Kierkegaardian Reflections on the Problem of Pluralism 0739185853, 9780739185858

Table of contents :
Home
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I. Objections to Pluralism
1. The Problem of Conflicting Truth-Claims
2. The Problem of the Criterion
3. The Problem of the Incarnation
Part II. Interreligious Dialogues
4. The Problem of Sin
5. The Jewish Problem
6. The Problem of Pantheism
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

KIERKEGAARDIAN REFLECTIONS ON THE PROBLEM OF PLURALISM

KIERKEGAARDIAN REFLECTIONS ON THE PROBLEM OF PLURALISM Aaron Fehir

LEXI NGTON B OOK S Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fehir, Aaron, 1981– Kierkegaardian reflections on the problem of pluralism / Aaron Fehir. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-8584-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-8585-8 (electronic) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855. 2. Religious pluralism. 3. Religion—Philosophy. 4. Religions. I. Title. B4378.R44F44 2015 201’.5—dc23 2015027758 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Abbreviations vii Introduction ix Part I. Objections to Pluralism

xvii

1. The Problem of Conflicting Truth-Claims

1

2. The Problem of the Criterion

29

3. The Problem of the Incarnation

45

Part II. Interreligious Dialogues

55

4. The Problem of Sin

57

5. The Jewish Problem

67

6. The Problem of Pantheism

79

Bibliography 99 Index 105 About the Author

109

v

Abbreviations

Note: With the exception of JP, all English language volumes referenced belong to Princeton’s Kierkegaard’s Writings series coedited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.

BA

The Book on Adler. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

CA

The Concept of Anxiety. Trans. Reidar Thomte, in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

CD

Christian Discourses; The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

CI

The Concept of Irony; together with “Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures.” Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

COR

The Corsair Affair. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.

CUP

Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments.” 2 vols. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

EO, 1

Either/Or. Vol. 1. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

EO, 2

Either/Or. Vol. 2. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

— vii —

viii Abbreviations EUD

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

FSE

For Self-Examination; Judge for Yourself! Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

FT

Fear and Trembling; Repetition. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

JC

Johannes Climacus, or “De omnibus dubitandum est.” See Philosophical Fragments.

JFY

Judge for Yourself! See For Self-Examination.

JP

Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. 7 vols. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978.

LD

Letters and Documents. Trans. Henrik Rosenmeier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

P

Prefaces; Writing Sampler. Trans. Todd W. Nichol. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

PC

Practice in Christianity. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

PF

Philosophical Fragments; Johannes Climacus. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

POV

Point of View. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

R

Repetition. See Fear and Trembling.

SLW

Stages on Life’s Way. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

SUD

The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

SV

Samlede Værker. 20 vols. Ed. A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 3rd Edition, 1962–1964.

TA

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age: A Literary Review. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

TDIO

Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

TM

The Moment and Late Writings. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

UDVS

Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

WA

Without Authority. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

WL

Works of Love. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Introduction

The question of religious pluralism—can more than one religion be true?—is not a question over which Søren Kierkegaard spilled much ink. In fact, it is not a very “Kierkegaardian” question at all. And if he were alive today, he might likely disapprove of its asking. Our question, he would point out, privileges the objective concern—is Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism true?—over the subjective issue—what must I do to be saved? Accordingly, it is regarded as inappropriate religious discourse. Whether my Hindu neighbor or my Buddhist family member is “saved” is none of my business. It is for God and God alone to decide such things. Hence, says Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Johannes Climacus, “I believe it would be appropriate discourse for a truly religious person if he said: I do not doubt anyone’s salvation; the only one I have fears about is myself.”1 Nevertheless, the problem of pluralism remains an important existential question, and we cannot dismiss it with deflationary answers. After all, the subjective issue—what must I do to be saved? what is the truth for me?—is not entirely divorced from objective concerns—should I pray at the mosque or the synagogue? should I obey the commandments of the Bible or should I obey the Koran? should I offer libations to Indra or sacrifices to my ancestors? The fact of religious diversity, that there is in reality more than one option for how I live and worship, means that the choice can never be a black and white choice between religiosity and secular atheism or godliness and godlessness, but is simultaneously a choice between this God and that, this sacred writing or that one, and so on.

— ix —

x Introduction

Let us not, then, be deterred by the potential hauntings of Danish ghosts and venture forth with the question. To start, how would Kierkegaard himself have answered the question of religious pluralism, that is, if we really twisted his arm? Kierkegaard was a Christian of course, and a fairly outspoken one at that. The notion of a personal God, the doctrine of sin and redemption, the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, the inspiration of the Christian scriptures—all of these distinctively Christian notions figure prominently throughout his corpus. Insofar as these various Christian doctrines conflict with alternative religious points of view—the impersonal Brahmin of Advaita Vedanta, the Jain doctrine of the inherent divinity of individual souls, the unitarian monotheism of Islam, and so on—we might naturally expect that Kierkegaard would embrace Christian doctrine as the truth and reject every conflicting doctrine as false. But Kierkegaard complicates the matter by having Climacus tell us that “Christianity is not a doctrine,”2 and shifts emphasis from the particular content of Christianity (the “what”) to the way in which faith in those Christian doctrines are held by the individual believer (the “how”). Touching directly upon our issue of religious diversity, Climacus furnishes us with the following thought-experiment: If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol— where, then, is there more truth?3

The answer to this parable is supposed to be blatantly obvious to “anyone who is not totally botched by scholarship and science.” It is the “person who is infinitely concerned that he in truth relate himself to God with infinite passion of need”4 who is in the truth. The point is that the what of faith, that is, the propositional content of one’s beliefs, is irrelevant for the purpose of being in the truth: “The passion of the infinite, not its content, is the deciding factor, for its content is itself.”5 What is essential and decisive is the how of faith. Being “in the truth” is not adhering to a doctrine, but rather, inhering in a particular mode of being. Accordingly, it might seem that the “parable of the penitent pagan,”6 together with the how/what distinction, swings the door wide open for a pluralistic understanding of religious diversity. As the metaphysical content of religious belief is apparently irrelevant, it would appear that the flood gates are opened to a relativistic point of view in which it does not essentially matter whether one is a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, or a Hindu, an atheist—even a Satanist. As long as one embraces his or her conception of the truth with pas-



Introduction

xi

sionate inwardness, then that one is properly regarded as being “in the truth.” “If only the how of this relation is in the truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth.”7 In other words, it seems that from a Kierkegaardian perspective it does not matter what you believe, as long as you are sincere. However, when we scratch beneath the surface of Kierkegaard’s massive oeuvre, we can only conclude that the facilitation of full-blown religious relativism could never have been Kierkegaard’s intention. In fact, it is quite clear that Kierkegaard held to some brand of Christian exclusivism, which privileges Christianity as the greatest and highest, if not the only, authentic mode of religious existence. Despite the framework for a prima facie case for religious pluralism on the basis of Kierkegaard’s notion of “truth as subjectivity,” there is abundant evidence that Kierkegaard himself was not a religious pluralist. For example, Kierkegaard maintained the classical conception of Christian supersessionism, which is the traditional Christian belief that Christianity fulfills, and therefore supersedes, the religion of Judaism. Throughout the corpus of his writings he treats Christianity’s relationship to non-Christian religions according to an evolutionary model in which paganism, which represents all pre-Judaic religion, as well as the various non-Western religions, is superseded by Judaism, which is “merely a point of transition”8 and is thereby superseded by Christianity, which “contains the most glorious life-view.”9 Thus, Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers are peppered with remarks such as the following: “[p]aganism has no concept of God’s majesty, which is the case with Judaism, too, although to a lesser degree.”10 In another context he speaks of the temptation of Christianity to give “up its sovereignty and be downgraded to wanting to live on equal terms with Judaism, paganism, and every other religion.”11 Or again, in the context of denouncing the pitiable state of Denmark’s Christendom: “[r]eligiously Denmark is so low that it is not only inferior to what has been seen of Christianity hitherto but is inferior to Judaism—yes, the only analogy is found in the lowest forms of paganism.”12 In all of these cases, there is no question regarding the superiority of Christianity among the religions in Kierkegaard’s view. Of course, it is hardly shocking that a nineteenth-century Christian thinker puts forward supersessionistic views toward Judaism and takes for granted that his own Christian religion is the pinnacle of religiosity. If one finds this remarkable at all it is only because it is difficult to reconcile with Kierkegaard’s dogged insistence on truth as subjectivity and his apparent abandonment of Christianity as doctrine and dogma. It is important for this reason to make clear the nature and basis of Kierkegaard’s exclusivism. Given the emphasis on truth as subjectivity and the

xii Introduction

importance of the how of religiosity over the what of religion, Kierkegaard cannot and does not make the case for the superiority of Christianity at the metaphysical level of doctrine. Rather, he builds his implicit case for exclusivism at the ethical and existential level of the subjectivity. Christianity, it is claimed, provides a mode of existence unavailable via non-Christian faiths and thus it is principally the how, not the what, of the various non-Christian religions that is inferior. In other words, Kierkegaard does not make the claim that Christianity does a better job of describing ultimate reality, provides a better metaphysical system, has more historical support, etc. Rather, he claims that Christianity is a better existence-communication in that its categories communicate, as indicated above, a more “glorious life-view.” The claim that only Christianity provides the highest mode of religious existence is also found in the Climacus writings. In the Postscript, Climacus draws a distinction between two spheres of religiosity. On the one hand, religiousness A, which involves resignation, internal suffering, and the consciousness of guilt, is characterized by self-effort and inward deepening. Religiousness B, on the other hand, marks a break with subjectivity. If the emphasis of religiousness A is that “subjectivity, inwardness, is truth,” then the new principle of religiousness B is that “subjectivity is untruth.”13 Yet this new principle should not be taken to mean that one goes beyond subjectivity by means of claiming truth for objectivity. “Subjectivity is untruth” does not mean that objectivity is truth. Rather, the point is that the movements of resignation and suffering made on one’s own strength are bound for guilt and failure, and thus subjectivity—that is, subjectivity in the sense of selfeffort through inward deepening—is insufficient for attaining an appropriate relation to eternal truth. The individual lacks the resources. In the sphere of religiousness B, on the other hand, the attention of the believer is directed to the insufficiency of inward deepening and the dangers of self-reliance. Guilt-consciousness is displaced by a more acute sin-consciousness and the individual’s self-identity is altogether replaced as she is “born again” as a “new creation.”14 While religiousness A represents the universally religious and is therefore achievable by men and women of any faith, the higher sphere of religiousness B is regarded as “decisively Christian”15 in Climacus’s estimation. Religiousness B is a possibility exclusively for those who have come into contact with distinctively Christian categories, particularly the paradox of God-in-time. Thus, while it is true that “[b]eing a Christian is defined not by the ‘what’ of Christianity but by the ‘how’ of the Christian,” it is also maintained by Climacus that “[t]his ‘how’ can fit only one thing, the absolute paradox,”16 which is the incarnation of God in Christ. Consequently, Climacus does not shy from the terrible implication that there are many who have never heard the



Introduction

xiii

Christian story of the incarnation and, accordingly, lack the condition necessary for eternal happiness: “[t]he happiness linked to a historical condition excludes all who are outside the condition, and among those are countless ones who are excluded through no fault of their own but by the accidental circumstance that Christianity has not yet been proclaimed to them.”17 Even while acknowledging Kierkegaard’s seemingly clear stance in favor of religious exclusivism, the present work maintains that the distinctions and categories of Kierkegaard’s texts provide a useful springboard for thinking productively and progressively in the direction of religious pluralism. Thus throughout the present work, the aim is not to remain true to Kierkegaard’s intentions, but to draw upon the philosophical and theological existential framework and various insights of Kierkegaard in order to advance a thesis and project that he most likely would have disapproved. Religious pluralism, as it understood here, contrasts with religious exclusivism, which is the view the only one religion is ultimately “correct,” or at least, more correct than all of the others. Understood in this way religious pluralism contrasts also with so-called “religious inclusivism,” which maintains epistemic exclusivism—only one religion is most true—while allowing for soteriological pluralism—the participants of more than one religion can be “saved.” Religious pluralism is the more robust thesis that many religions are more or less equally true and good and that no one religion is either soteriologically or epistemically better than all of the rest. The first half of the present work consists of three chapters, each of which gives treatment to one of three standard objections to religious pluralism. These are the problem of conflicting truth-claims, the problem of the criterion, and the problem of the incarnation. The problem of conflicting truth-claims is the objection to the claim that many religions are equally true. There are many different religions and they do not all teach the same things. Accordingly, the objection goes, at most only one religion can be true. The Kierkegaardian solution to this problem has already been hinted toward above, namely, to understand religiosity in terms of existence-communication rather than doctrine about objective truth. This approach is further articulated in chapter 1, in which Kierkegaard’s conception of truth as subjectivity, along with the Buddhist understanding of religion as “skillful means” (upaya), is drawn upon as a resource for providing a response to the problem of conflicting truth-claims. According to the second objection, religious pluralism leads to unrestricted relativism. Why stop, for example, with the claim that the major post-axial religions are all equally true? Once the pluralistic hypothesis is posited, there seems to be no good way of distinguishing between genuine manifestations of true religion and false ones. Accordingly, the pluralistic hypothesis would

xiv Introduction

seem to suggest that Nazism, Satanism, and religions built around childsacrifice could be just as true and good as the major post-axial faiths. By what criteria are we to decide what we should believe and which religion we should follow? In response to this concern, chapter 3 argues that Kierkegaard provides us with resources for addressing the problem of the criterion. The third standard objection treated in the present work is the problem of the incarnation for religious pluralism. According to this objection, one cannot be both a believer in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation and a religious pluralist. The doctrine of the incarnation, if true, excludes the possibility that any non-Christian religions are equally as good as the Christian religion. John Hick, a Christian philosopher who puts forward his own theory of religious pluralism, formulates the objection as follows: The traditional Christian understanding of Jesus of Nazareth is that he was God incarnate, who became a man to die for the sins of the world and who founded the church to proclaim this. If he was indeed God incarnate, Christianity is the only religion founded by God in person, and must as such be uniquely superior to all other religions.18

Accordingly, the objection goes, one cannot be both a believer in the incarnation and a religious pluralist. In refutation of this objection to pluralism, chapter 4 argues that we can find resources in Kierkegaard for a response that is intellectually tenable and, in comparison to certain contemporary solutions to the problem such as that of Hick himself, more potentially satisfying from a spiritual and theological perspective as well. The second part of the work, also composed of three chapters, advances the thesis of religious pluralism by putting Kierkegaard into dialogue with specific texts and thinkers of various non-Christian religious traditions. First, it is argued in chapter 4, contra to Kierkegaard’s own exclusivism, that religiousness B finds a notable parallel Pure Land Buddhism, particularly with respect to the way in which the problem of sin is addressed. Then, in chapter 5, Kierkegaard’s “Jewish problem” is tackled. It is argued that Kierkegaard’s Christian supersessionism is based on faulty assumptions and characterizations of the Jewish religion and thus provides no obstacle to recognition of Judaism as an equally valid, albeit non-Christian, path to eternal happiness. Finally, in chapter 6, Kierkegaard is put into dialogue with Taoism, where his understanding of the problem of pantheism is addressed. While there are many passages in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre that clearly betray a low view of “pantheism,” it is argued that these remarks do not automatically apply to Asian pantheism, and that Taoism in particular, far from being “pantheistic” according to Kierkegaard’s understanding, is instead a notable bedfellow to Kierkegaard, especially in relation to its polemical stance toward Confucianism.



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Notes  1. CUP, 389n. Except when speaking in a general way about what I take to be Kierkegaard’s views, I customarily follow the practice of citing the various pseudonyms rather than attributing specific direct quotations to Kierkegaard himself. This is in accord with his own desire that distance be placed between himself and his pseudonymous authorship. See CUP, 627.   2. Ibid., 379.   3. Ibid., 201.  4. Ibid.   5. Ibid., 203   6. This phrase is borrowed from a colleague who discusses the pertinent passage at length in an as yet unpublished paper, Erik M. Hanson, “Was Kierkegaard a Christian Inclusivist?” (paper presented at the Society of Christian Philosophers, Conference in Honor of Keith Yandell, 2005).  7. CUP, 199.  8. JP, 2:2208.  9. Ibid., 5:5222. Note that Islam has no special place in Kierkegaard’s understanding of religious evolution, but is rather regarded as a poor imitation of Christianity. See JP, 3:2736: “It is therefore very interesting to see the Mohammedans in a curiously ironical manner bearing the coat of arms which so appropriately characterizes their relationship to Christianity—the moon, which borrows its light from the sun.” 10. Ibid., 3:2558. 11. Ibid., 1:599, emphasis mine. 12. Ibid., 3:2763. 13. CUP, 207. 14. Ibid., 576. 15. Ibid., 557. 16. Ibid., 610–11. 17. Ibid., 583. 18. John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), ix.

PART I OBJECTIONS TO PLURALISM

1 The Problem of Conflicting Truth-Claims

T

o frame the position somewhat crudely, religious pluralism is the view that all of the world’s major religions are equally true and truly good, and accordingly, that the faithful adherents of any one particular religious tradition are no more or less in right relation to the truth on the whole than the faithful adherents of any other true and good religion. This position stands in contrast to both religious exclusivism and soteriological inclusivism on the one hand, and religious skepticism on the other.1 It differs from the former pair of positions in that it denies that there is only one true or best religion, and it differs from religious skepticism insofar as it is a religiously realist response to the fact of religious diversity rather than a purely anti-realist response or a merely secular agnosticism.2 As here defined, religious pluralism thus maintains that there is some real fact of the matter as to what constitutes the truth, that the truth is a religiously significant and absolute reality, and that there are multiple historical religions that convey and communicate this truth. Immediately, however, there is an obstacle for religious pluralism. Given the sheer breadth of claims that have been laid to the truth of religion, it takes but a little reflection to grasp the difficulty that the so-called “problem of conflicting truth-claims” poses. Sacred texts such as the Torah and the Koran, for example, place well-defined restrictions on what is lawful and unlawful in regards to food, clothing, and the appropriate manner in which livestock ought to be slaughtered. In the New Testament the ceremonial and dietary laws of the Old Testament are regarded as having found “fulfillment” through the person of Jesus Christ and are thus not considered binding by most Chris—1—

2

Chapter 1

tians. Difference and conflict between religious doctrines thus shows itself at every turn. For Muslims and Orthodox Jews, eating pork is an unlawful violation. For Christians, eating pork is wholly a matter of conscience. To the Christian, the New Testament is regarded as sacred scripture and the Jesus professed in those documents is the Messiah. For a Jew to assent to these propositions being true, a religious conversion would first be required. There are also many other formal contradictions between and within the major religious traditions. Christianity and Islam hold the doctrine that there is but one life, at the end of which we will be judged and enter into our eternal abode. Buddhism and Hinduism maintain belief in reincarnation and seek the ultimate goal of liberation from the wheel of death and rebirth. Likewise, theistic belief in an omnipotent and omnibenevolent Creator is a key and central component of the three major Abrahamic religions, and it is hard to fathom what would be left of these religions absent monotheism. Yet, even the bare concept of God as a supreme deity plays little or no role at all in Budd­hism. In fact, many Theravada and Zen practitioners might rightly classify themselves as atheists. How could it be that these various religions convey and communicate the same essential truth? Each religion has its own distinct set of doctrines and teachings that are fundamentally at odds with all the others. Contrary to religious pluralism, it would thus seem obvious that at most only one religion can be true. Perhaps the most well-known and impressive attempt at resolving the problem of conflicting truth-claims finds its expression in John Hick’s defense of pluralistic hypothesis, according to which “the great post-axial faiths constitute different ways of experiencing, conceiving and living in relation to an ultimate divine Reality which transcends all our varied visions of it.”3 Taking his cue from the fact that in many religious traditions there is a distinction between reality as it is in our perception and absolute reality as it is in itself, such as the distinction between saguna Brahman and nirguna Brahman in Hinduism, the Tao that can be expressed versus the eternal Tao in Taoism, . and conventional truth (samvrti-satya ) and ultimate truth (paramārtha. satya) in Buddhism, and then understanding this distinction through the Kantian framework of phenomenal reality versus noumenal reality, Hick thus distinguishes between the Real as it is experienced and discussed in the concrete expressions of the various post-axial faiths and the Real an sich, as it is in itself and apart from all merely human categories, language, and experience. The value of this distinction is that enables us to account for the great diversity and conflicting understandings of absolute truth within each religion, while also allowing that the Real an sich, which each of these various expressions wrestle and attempt to explain, is absolute truth in itself. The cost, of course, is that no one system or body of religious doctrines fully and



The Problem of Conflicting Truth-Claims

3

adequately captures and explains the truth and so in the end no one religion is fully and literally true in the sense that it gets all of the facts correct, but this fact is ultimately unsurprising given its consistency with the idea already inherent in each of the major religious traditions that the fullness of truth is ultimately beyond comprehension by finite human beings. Subjectivity and the God’s Honest Gospel Truth In order to better grasp Hick’s pluralistic hypothesis, and also as a bridge to connecting it with the emphatically and decisively Christian framework of Kierkegaard, it is a useful and noteworthy analogy to think here of the nature of testimony to an historical event, and then in particular, the manner in which the four Gospels of the New Testament express and communicated the life of Jesus of Nazareth. To consider the generic case first, consider the situation of a police officer who finds himself at the scene of a traffic accident and who consults witnesses to the event in order to reconstruct what really happened. He interviews four bystanders and receives four similar, yet not perfectly reconcilable, accounts of the event. Must we assume that the differences are deliberate distortions on behalf of the witnesses? Should we assume that because the four stories are ultimately different and incompatible that no one of the four really experienced the accident after all? In fact, no such result follows. Rather, the policeman knows and expects that eyewitness testimonies will not always line up perfectly. In fact, if the four stories of the witnesses were word for word identical or even just too similar, the police officer would then have reasonable grounds for suspecting that the story being told is actually a lie, deliberately constructed via collaboration of the witnesses prior to his arrival upon the scene of the accident. The fact that each testimony from each eyewitness tells the story from a particular vantage point, each highlighting unique aspects of what was heard and seen, and expressing those facts in ways that don’t completely and fully line up with the facts as expressed from each of the other vantage points, is precisely what is expected. Hick’s pluralistic hypothesis, likewise, is that each of the major post-axial religions, similarly to those witnesses, each express a good and reliable of a report as can possibly be expected given the incomprehensibility of the Real an sich. In the Gospels, similarly, we receive four stories of the Christ-event that each tell something of the same story about Jesus, but that do so from unique points of view and in a way that is ultimately irreconcilable with the other three accounts. If each and every detail of the four Gospels were to be taken in woodenly literal fashion as a direct and immediate expression of the absolute truth, then it would have to be admitted that at most only one of the four

4

Chapter 1

Gospels is true. But rather, if each is seen for what it is, an interpretation of the Christ-event from the unique vantage point of a particular witness with distinctive aims, assumptions, and audiences in mind, then it is hardly surprising at all that there should be some degree of incompatible difference. In the solution to the four Gospels problem, we thus detect another clue to the problem of conflicting truth-claims for religious pluralism. Conceding that the primary aim of the authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is ultimately to spread the truth of the Gospel to ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans, not to provide an accurate and objective history of the life of Jesus according to the paradigm of modern science and modern historiographical methods, it would seem that we are in danger of missing the point of the Gospels entirely if we force them into that modern paradigm. The objective truth of the historical Jesus cannot to be found simply and straightforwardly in the pages of the Gospel. Neither can it be found through an objective and scholarly search. As evidenced by the inconsistent panoply of historical constructions from Strauss to the Jesus Seminar, reading and comprehending the Gospels in a purely objective modern and historicalcritical manner has made little progress in successfully determining the identity and events of the “real” Jesus and what “really” happened in and around Galilee and Jerusalem two thousand years ago.4 The very fact that the details are so fuzzy when approached objectively, and that when taken literally, the claims of the Gospels aren’t very probable from a historical point of view, suggests that the real point of the Gospels may be missed when approached in that manner. Instead, Kierkegaard indicates that the entire point of what the Gospels communicate to us is not cognitive apprehension of a set of facts, but rather, the communication of a particular way of living and being in the world. For this reason, it is even useful to think of the obscurities and contradictions as intentional misdirection on behalf of the divine author of the Gospels, that is, precisely so we don’t miss this important point. “God wants Holy Scripture to be the object of faith and an offense to any other point of view,” Kierkegaard argues, “for this reason there are carefully contrived discrepancies . . . therefore it is written in bad Greek, etc.” Even if it is to be assumed that “Scripture is inspired divine revelation,” it doesn’t thereby follow that “there must be perfect harmony between all the reports down to the least detail; it must be the most perfect Greek, etc.”5 The indirect communication is actually an essential part of the transmission of the very mode of existence that the Gospel writers aim to convey and communicate, namely, the most essential aspects of the life of Jesus Christ, whom we might even say, is the truth and who shows us the way of truth. As one of the Gospel writers places upon the lips of this elusive historical figure in his attempt to capture some aspect



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of what Jesus of Nazareth was all about, “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”6 It is no doubt a little ironic that it is in this passage of the Gospels in particular, in which Christ is declared to be the only way and identified with truth itself, that we should hope to find the key to unlocking some part of the truth in a way that opens up a resolution of the problem of conflicting truthclaims. Yet, it is precisely for this reason that we should find Kierkegaard’s understanding of truth to be of such value in this context. One of the potential weaknesses of Hick’s own response to the problem of conflicting truth-claims is that he tends to clear up the inconsistencies between the various religious responses to the real in a way that leaves us with little more than a “lowest common denominator” soteriology,7 in which the truth of religion is to be found in its ability to move those who invest in it from “self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness.”8 Moreover, he tends to leave the content of this Reality-centeredness obscure and potentially empty. By contrast, Kierkegaard places clear and concrete emphasis upon the truth of the New Testament, which he regards as a series of “highway signs” declaring “Christ is the way”9 and pointing not only to the teachings of Christ, but even more importantly, to his uniquely divine status and his life of suffering for the truth, even to the point of death on a cross. Yet, it is not so much in spite of various contradictions and imperfections within the New Testament that the truth manages to be communicated, but precisely because of them. If everything were conveyed and communicated clearly and without ambiguity, we would be more tempted to understand the truth purely intellectually and relate to it first and primarily as a body of doctrine, a philosophy, or an academic theology. But if we thought the point of the religion were primarily to give us an intellectual understanding of the truth, we would miss the real point of the New Testament, namely, that we who hear the truth of what is here being conveyed and communicated should turn from the wisdom of the world and embrace the foolishness of Christ.10 A fully accurate approximation of the objective truth of the Gospel story is thus not only irrelevant to faith, but its “objective uncertainty”11 is what actually provides the very stimulus for passionate faith. Once I give up all hope and pretension of securing a strong epistemic relation to Christian doctrine, I realize that faith must consist in something other than mere belief, namely subjective and passionate involvement with the meaning of the doctrine for me and listening in inwardness what God would want to tell me. It is spirit to ask about two things: (1) Is what is being said possible? (2) Am I able to do it? But it is lack of spirit to ask about two things: (1) Did it actually happen? (2) Has my neighbor Christophersen done it; has he actually done it?12

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, a deep admirer of Kierkegaard’s philosophy on these points, also draws this lesson from the four Gospels problem: God has four people recount the life of his incarnate son, in each case differently and with inconsistencies—but might we not say: It is important that this narrative should not be more than quite averagely historically plausible just so that this should not be taken as the essential, decisive thing? So that the letter should not be believed more strongly than is proper and the spirit may receive its due?13

If one were to have good, objective reasons for believing the Gospel, if the objective truth-value of Christianity were to become anything more than an objective uncertainty, then one could very likely lose sight of the essential “spirit” existentially communicated by the Gospel.14 Her “faith” would become an objective something to which she can point to and say, “Yes, I have faith; I believe in God the Father, maker of Heaven and Earth.” True faith, on the other hand, requires an epoché of belief.15 In other words, since faith is not a what of doctrine, the latter should be held critically and nondogmatically lest one lose sight of the essential how of faith. It is the very fact that one does not concern oneself with the truth of a doctrine in a purely objective way that leads the individual to passionately embrace the doctrine in some other way, namely subjectively, as a truth that is true for me: What I really need is to get clear about what I am to do, not what I must know. . . . What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through the philosophical systems . . . of what use would it be to me to be able to formulate the meaning of Christianity, to be able to explain many specific points—if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life? . . . Of what use would it be to me for truth to stand before me, cold and naked, not caring whether or not I acknowledged it, making me uneasy rather than trustingly receptive.16

“Christianity is not a doctrine,” says Johannes Climacus, “but it expresses an existence-contradiction.”17 When we are called to faith in Christ it is not first and foremost required that we should sharpen our intellect and get clear on the facts, but rather, that we should put on the mind of Christ,18 pick up our cross, and follow him.19 The essential message here is that “truth is subjectivity.”20 In the case of essential truth, “the truth is not different from the way” to truth.21 The truth for us is passion, prayerfulness, and a “daring venture.”22 It is not a what, but a how. It is the willingness to risk and “absolutely to venture everything,”23 to suffer inwardly, even physically, for the sake of its attainment. To know the truth in the right way is thus not a matter of adher-



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ing to the truth with the intellect, but to inhere in the truth in a concrete and fully embodied way. Crucial for the one concerned with personal dimensions of religious life is . . . that the original etymological meaning of “religion” is an action verb, not a noun: religare denotes a way of life, not a doctrine or belief system. “To religion” is not the same as to “have” or “lose” a religion (as in the song by R.E.M.). One cannot “have” a religion; one can “be” or live religiously or in a religious way (Tao Te Ching: Tao is the Way; the Gospels: Jesus is the Way; Kierkegaard: Christianity is not a doctrine but existence-communication). The noun form of religion emphasizes the right (orthodox) doctrine versus the heterodox (heretical, deviant) one .  .  . “to religion” is to inhere in one’s existence spiritually in every moment of life. “To be a theist or atheist,” one espouses or rejects beliefs, one adheres to the right teaching (orthodoxy).24

We might thus admit with the author of James that “[e]ven the demons believe,”25 and that, at a minimum, faith must be something more than belief. In fact, it is arguably something of an entirely different order altogether, namely, the work of conforming oneself to a particular mode of life.26 “Christianity is not a doctrine, but . . . is an existence-communication.”27 Climacus has no interest in religion as a noun. He is not interested in the objective issue, which “would be about the truth of Christianity,”28 except to argue that the truth of Christianity is “objectively uncertain.”29 In fact, in the first part of the Postscript, he argues explicitly that neither historical research (a posteriori reasoning) nor speculation (a priori reasoning) is capable of leading to the conclusion that Christianity is objectively true.30 Rather, Climacus’s interests lie entirely in the subjective issue, which is “about the individual’s relation to Christianity.”31 Elsewhere in the Postscript, Kierkegaard draws this distinction using a somewhat more refined terminology. He distinguishes between two ways of being concerned with the truth. First, one can be concerned with the truth of Christianity objectively in which case “truth is reflected upon objectively as an object to which the knower relates himself.”32 In this case, what matters is that the object being related to is “in the truth.” So long as the object is in the truth, then the subject who relates to the object is also in the truth, irrespective of how the subject is related. Thus, if what matters is the objective truth of Christianity, as opposed to the truth of the individual’s relation to Christianity, then a Christian is someone who acknowledges the objective truth of Christianity, irrespective of how he or she relates to her Christianity. In response to Climacus’s question—“How can I, Johannes Climacus, share in the happiness that Christianity promises?”33—the objective thinker replies in terms of belief, intellectual assent to the proposition that Christianity is the

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truth. There is, however, a second, more existential way of approaching the question about the truth of Christianity: “When the question about truth is asked subjectively, the individual’s relation is reflected upon subjectively.”34 In this second case, the objective status of the what to which the individual is related is irrelevant. Climacus is explicit about this: “If only the how of this relation is in the truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth.”35 The point is that the what of faith, that is, the propositional content of one’s beliefs, is not the primary determining factor for the purpose of being in the truth in the essentially religious sense: “The passion of the infinite, not its content, is the deciding factor, for its content is itself.”36 What is essential and decisive is the how of faith. Early on in the Postscript Climacus argues that it is impossible for a human being to base his or her eternal happiness on objective historical reasoning.37 The problem with such reasoning, according to Climacus, is that no measure of real certainty can be obtained from it: “nothing is easier to perceive than this, that with regard to the historical the greatest certainty is only an approximation.”38 The winds of change inherent to historical scholarship are always blowing. Accordingly, since one’s eternal happiness is a matter of infinite importance, it is neither safe nor wise to attempt to base one’s eternal happiness on a “simple historical fact.”39 Eternal happiness must have some surer foundation, something that excludes the possibility of doubt. Especially relevant to the point I want to make here are Climacus’s remarks in this context regarding what he refers to as zealotism: To be infinitely interested in relation to that which at its maximum always remains only an approximation is a self-contradiction and is thus comical. If passion is posited nonetheless, zealotism ensues.  .  . . The fault inheres not in the infinitely interested passion but in this, that its object has become an approximation-object.40

In other words, whether one believes six impossible things before breakfast or whether one believes seven propositions that have a high probability of being true, cognitive belief based on historical truths cannot be the basis of faith. So long as what is related to is the objective truth of a historical doctrine, the relation can only be an approximation relationship; and where one becomes “infinitely interested” in the objective truth of a doctrine, she thus becomes a comical fanatic. The risk of faith cannot be an impassioned leap toward belief where the evidence alone is insufficient to convince since that is precisely how the zealot is defined. Of course, as Climacus points out, the fault is not in the passion; the passion is admirable. The fault lies in the comical willingness to place one’s eternal happiness in an “approximation-object,” a historical doctrine, which



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is susceptible to doubt. Suppose that I were to base my Christian convictions on some piece of historical evidence that is supposed to support those convictions, such as evidence for the claim that there was a man Jesus, who was also God, and who died and rose from the dead. If this were the case, then it would surely be appropriate for me to abandon my convictions in the event that I become confronted with indisputable evidence contrary to those convictions. The move of the fanatic (the “zealot”) in this case would be to turn a blind eye toward the upsetting evidence and throw himself full-on toward belief despite the evidence. Climacus’s apparently low opinion of the fanatic suggests that this is not an appropriate maneuver. Belief, in the cognitive-intellectual sense of adherence to doctrine, in spite of overwhelming contrary evidence would be crude irrationalism.41 Climacus’s recommendation is to get out of the “evidence-game” altogether by basing faith on something indisputable, indubitable, and thus worthy of staking one’s eternal happiness on, namely truth as subjectivity. Thus, the Climacean formula “without risk, no faith” cannot mean that faith is predicated on a risky cognitive leap; in fact, faith cannot allow such risk.42 Compare this with the remarks of that other father of Christian existentialism, Fyodor Dostoevsky: “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I would still prefer to remain in Christ rather than with the truth.”43 In other words, even if all objective evidence pointed to the non-existence of a historical Jesus, or the impossibility of the incarnation, or the implausibility of a bodily resurrection, Christ would still be worth hanging onto, as the object of faith, imitation and love.44 Climacus’s so-called “approximation argument”45 is making the same point. Climacus argues that since all historical truths (e.g., the claim that Jesus rose from the dead or, more mundanely, the truth that Caesar crossed the Rubicon in the year 49 BC) are open to revision in light of new evidence, then it is not worth staking our eternal happiness on such things. Like Dostoevsky, Climacus knows well that the Christian’s happiness is staked elsewhere, namely on Christ. Even if it should turn out that all the evidence is stacked against, say, the resurrection, that by itself takes nothing whatsoever away from faith. Since faith is not belief, but inhering in a mode of being, the passion of faith as such is impervious to antiapologetics.46 Conversely, it is not in the least helped by apologetics either. To think that apologetics can succeed at contributing anything at all to faith, even when all the evidence blows in the direction of faith, is a category mistake. The objective truth of the body of doctrines associated with Christianity is completely irrelevant. So long as one has faith, which is characterized by appropriation of the truth, rather than its approximation, he or she is “in the truth” in the subjective sense, which is all

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that matters. To allow seemingly friendly evidence to become the basis for faith is a dangerous game. If we allow friendly evidence to play a supporting role, then we have no grounds at all for disallowing any potential unfriendly evidence. So rather than playing the evidence game, Climacus’s approximation argument shows the way out of the game altogether, recognizing the content of faith as something other than an approximation-object, in particular, a how rather than a what.47 What then does Climacus mean when he suggests that objective uncertainty provides a stimulus to passion? In keeping with emphasis upon appropriation rather than approximation, Kierkegaard’s suggestion is that the appropriate response to religious doctrines is not one of cognitive acceptance of creeds—whether the “blind acceptance” of the fanatic or “rational acceptance” of the philosopher—but letting the lesson of the doctrine become meaningful, letting the story of the Gospel move you and compel you into impassioned involvement with yourself and with the world around you.48 In various places throughout his writings, Kierkegaard suggests that one of the most prophetic voices in the entire New Testament is that of Pontius Pilate. If we grasp the meaning of this episode according to Kierkegaard’s interpretation, we will also thereby more fully understand Climacus’s definition of truth as subjectivity and the limitations inherent in approaching the truth objectively. Pilate . . . asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews? . . . What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, “I find no case against him. . . . Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him.” . . . Pilate tried to release him, but the Jews cried out, “If you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against the emperor.” Then he handed him over to them to be crucified.49

Climacus claims that Pilate wouldn’t have allowed Jesus to be condemned, and most certainly wouldn’t have washed his hands of an innocent man’s blood,50 had he asked the question “What is truth?” subjectively rather than objectively and cynically. Had he asked in subjective earnestness and had he been willing himself to suffer for the truth rather than to let an innocent man die, he then could have seen that the truth was standing right in front of him.51 To approach subjectively, is to approach the truth with the passion of infinity, which is no mere enthusiasm, but willingness to suffer for the truth



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and risk offense toward Caesar rather than winning the favor of the crowd, genuine epistemic humility and willingness to submit to the truth rather than cynical posturing and then washing one’s hands of responsibility. It is passionate searching and a longing readiness to receive the truth rather than being content to turn a blind eye when an inconvenient truth stands there, staring one in the face. Pilate thus shows us how lack of subjectivity leads to untruth, whereas had only he been truly subjective and shared in Christ’s passion by suffering with him rather than turning him over to suffer at the hands of the crowd, he himself would be in relationship with the truth is the deepest of all possible manners. What is truth? The truth is the life of Christ itself. Thus Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only true explanation of what truth is. . . . This means that truth in the sense in which Christ is the truth is not a sum of statements, not a definition etc., but a life. The being of truth is not the direct redoubling of being in relation to thinking. . . . No, the being of truth is the redoubling of truth within yourself, within me, within him, that your life, my life, his life expresses the truth approximately in the striving for it.52

A life in Christ is what it means to be in the truth, that is, a life of suffering, indeed undeserved and voluntary suffering, for the sake of others and for the sake of the truth. This is the only way. The how of subjectivity is the way of the Cross and a life lived in obedience to all that which the Christ-event calls us. We can never come to know all the details by way of objective history, and even if we did manage to uncover the historical Jesus, there would be nothing to compel us to believe that he was in fact the King of Kings. But the goal is not to know the truth, but to be in the truth and responsive to the truth that presents itself. Just as even the demons believe and know objectively that there is a God, Pilate had the objective truth right there in front of him, but he was too blinded by fear and selfish ambition to relate himself to it. He would rather win favor with the crowd and not make any trouble with the emperor. Worse, he can’t even own up and take responsibility, but instead takes refuge in a disinterested, indifferent, and cynical agnosticism, scoffing, “What is truth?” and washing his hands. The incomprehensible passion of Christ is the how of subjectivity. It is the way of Christian love and totally contrary to the ordinary love and lust of the world, which is bound up inextricably with the way of power, pride, money, and selfishness—indeed, all the things the man Jesus himself railed against as being nothing more that false treasure and distraction from truth. Pilate couldn’t let go of these things, and so did not know the truth, did not want to know the truth. But when one commits oneself to truth and commits

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oneself to it fully, there is no longer anxiousness over the question of objective truth. It becomes plainly obvious that the truth for me, the only truth, the most essential truth lies wholly in subjectivity and passion. “To be the truth is the only explanation of what truth is . . . not to know the truth but to be the truth.”53 Westphal on the How/What Distinction Thus far it has been maintained that religious truth consists in the how rather than the what and in appropriation rather than approximation. This view would seem to find further support in the following thought experiment: If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol— where, then, is there more truth?54

Climacus assumes the answer to be obvious. The one who lives in the truth without understanding the truth is most clearly in higher relation to essential religious truth than the hypocritical Christian who understands the truth but does not live it. Merold Westphal, however, has argued that Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the importance of the how of faith should not overshadow Kierkegaard’s commitment to a particular what. In other words, even though intellectual assent to doctrine is by no means the most important part of the life of faith, it is nonetheless an essential part of what it means to have faith.55 Specifically, Westphal calls our attention to the fact that the parable only suggests that the pagan who prays truly to a false God is in a better position than the one who prays falsely to the true God, not that the pagan is in an ideal position. The question is only where there is more truth. But just because the pagan is more in the truth than the hypocritical Christian does not thereby entail that the pagan resides in the fullness of truth. No matter the passion, the pagan nonetheless remains separated from the fullness of truth by praying to the wrong God. Westphal comments, “nothing Climacus says suggests that it does not matter what one believes. To say that it is better to have a transmission that slips than to have a broken fuel pump is not to say that it does not matter whether or not your transmission slips. It is only to say that one problem is more serious than the other.”56 According to Westphal’s reasoning, we can thus discern a hierarchy of four different positions that individuals might existentially inhabit in Climacus’s parable. At the bottom of the hierarchy, the false pagan lacks both the appro-



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priate how and the appropriate what. Then there is the false Christian, who lacks the appropriate how but at least maintains the appropriate what, and so is in the truth objectively even while lacking the more important passion of subjective truth. The true pagan is then in the opposite position to that of the false Christian, praying with the passion of the infinite, thereby having the right how, but lacking the appropriate what. Finally, at the pinnacle, is there is the “true Christian” who prays with infinite passion to the true God, thus having both the what and the how in proper order. Accordingly, the mere fact that the pagan of Climacus’s parable does not suffer from the ailment of the falsely praying Christian does not thereby make the pagan free of all shortcomings whatsoever. The pagan does not suffer the more serious problem of a broken fuel pump, as is suffered by the false Christian, but nonetheless suffers from a slipping transmission insofar as he lacks an appropriate understanding of the what. While lacking an appropriate understanding of the what is not as serious a problem as lacking the appropriate how, it is nonetheless a serious problem, and it is a problem that a passionately praying true Christian does not suffer. Westphal’s argument is not without merit. However, Westphal’s notion that the ideal human being is one that embodies not just the right how, but also the right what, could be potentially misleading if the reasoning is taken to rest on a faulty assumption about the real possibility of an existing human being cognitive apprehending the true what without error. Westphal’s analogy implies that the pagan who prays with the passion of the infinite suffers from some kind of defect, thereby suggesting that what is necessary for the pagan to be wholly and ideally in the truth would be to grasp the object of his devotion more clearly. In a respect, this is right; the pagan’s understanding of the true God is ultimately distorted by the fact that he or she approaches God by means of an idol. But consider the case of a “Christian”—that is, a Christian in the sociological sense, one who is baptized, attends Church services, gives assent to the Nicene Creed, etc. Is the falsely praying Christian’s understanding of what God is somehow more accurate and complete than that of the pagan, who at least realizes the depths of his own finitude? Climacus gives us no such indication. Rather, since the how is the what, lacking the appropriate how is not the Christian’s only problem, but rather he also suffers from a misunderstanding of the what. God himself is this: how one involves himself with Him. As far as physical and external objects are concerned, the object is something else than the mode; there are many modes; someone perhaps stumbles upon a lucky way, etc. In respect to God, the how is what. He who does not involve himself with God in the mode of absolute devotion does not become involved with God.57

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Moreover, in Kierkegaardian perspective, no human being—no matter whether Christian or pagan—can help but suffer the inability to adequately comprehend the what of cognitive belief. It is a limitation built into our fundamental predicament as finite and sinful human agents and cannot be reduced to a result of one’s having been born a pagan rather than a Christian. Climacus knows this well: “I am only a poor existing human being who neither eternally nor divinely nor theocentrically is able to observe the eternal but must be content with existing.”58 Human finitude and sin prevent human beings from experiencing ultimate reality from a God’s eye point of view. In the words of Climacus, “the highest truth there is for an existing person”59 is subjectivity, and existentially, only how one relates oneself matters. Accordingly, while it is correct for Westphal to maintain that the ideal situation for a human being is for that individual to be in right relation to the what, we poor existing human beings would do well to wholly devote ourselves to the how side of this relation and leave claims to possession of the correct what to the “superorthodox.”60 Skillful Means and Indirect Communication We learn early in elementary school that i comes before e except after c and that one and one and one always add up to three. And such things are surely not unimportant. But just as many of the lessons that matter most in life are arguably not the kinds of truths that can be taught and learned within the confines of classroom walls or in a book at the local library, the most important kind of religious truth is not something that one comes to by means of intellectual endeavor and assent. Moreover, many of the “small-t” truths we learn in grade school sometimes turn out not to be as true as we first thought. We eventually learn that i comes after e in more cases than just after c, such as in the words “weigh” and “neighbor” and, perhaps most ironically, “weird.” As we mature we realize that “the truth” isn’t quite as simple and fixed as we initially pretended. Of course, those small-t truths have their place and it would be quite silly to throw the whole cold hard truth of reality at a child, with all of its rough edges and nuances, and expect the child to survive the weight of it let alone be usefully guided. The truth, after all, can be quite ugly, or just as much, too beautiful for little eyes to appreciate. Accordingly, skillful and compassionate parents and educators will teach and guide children to the truth in small steps, one small-t truth at a time, even knowing full well that many of those small-t truths will turn out to be something of a little white lie. Skillful parents and educators also know that the most important things they teach are not the contents of true propositions, but rather, a way of life.



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They are not simply seeking to pack information into little heads, but to form passions and transform characters. To use Kierkegaardian terminology, the emphasis is on the how rather than the what. In other words, truth is subjectivity. The Kierkegaardian priority of the how and the limitations of the what are usefully paralleled in the Mahayana Buddhist conception of upaya, or skillful means. Once upon a time there lived an old man, says the Lotus Sutra. 61 He lived in a large house with hundreds of servants and his many children. But although very rich, the once great mansion was wearing down and in need of many repairs. One day the great house suddenly and unexpectedly caught fire, and because it was so old and dry, it would only be a matter of moments before the entire structure would fall to the flames. The old man happened to be outside in his garden when all of this happened, but his many young children were inside playing with their dolls and toys. Too young to be aware of what was happening all around them, the young children continued to occupy themselves merrily with their playthings, making no effort at all to escape the blaze. But the old man, of course, was very worried and acted quickly to try and save his children from a hasty and premature death. In quick desperation, he rushed into the house and told his children of the fire. But due to their innocent and naïve nature, the young children did not understand. So the elder speedily concocted a plan. Knowing the proclivities of the children and just the type of toys and playthings each of them liked, he told them to hurry quickly outside: “Come quickly. If you do not take them when you can, you are going to regret it later. There are carts full of toys, drawn by goats, deer, and oxen. Come out of the house at once and whatever you want will be yours!” And when the small children heard their aged father telling them about these rare and magnificent playthings, the children all became very excited and rushed headlong for the door, even pushing and elbowing one another as they dashed wildly out of the burning house. When they arrived outside, they realized that their father had not told them the truth. Instead of the goat-carts and deer-carts and ox-carts he had promised, there was only a single type of cart, more magnificent and wondrous than any of the children could have imagined without seeing it with their own eyes. And although they were in one sense deceived as the father had tricked them with descriptions of carts and toys of their own preference, the father is not guilty of false speech62 because the children would now have even greater playthings than what were promised, and more importantly, they were now safe and far away from being engulfed by the burning flames. It is the same, implies the Lotus Sutra, with the Buddha as it is with the old man who lures his children out of the house. Although the historical Shakya-

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muni Buddha taught and preached many things that are not strictly and literally true, he used these teachings as expedient means. The doctrines and teachings of the Buddha spoke specifically to the proclivities and inclinations of his disciples. While his disciples would eventually realize upon enlightenment that they have in a sense been motivated by doctrines and teachings that are really only half-truths or even little white lies, when they escape this burning house that we are now inclined to regard as life and reality, they will then realize even greater things than what the Buddha himself had promised to them. It is fitting that the Lotus Sutra should relay to us the doctrine of skillful means by way of a story. When one tells such a story in such a context it is usually understood that it is unimportant whether the events of the story really unfolded in history in exactly the manner that is being portrayed in the story or even whether the events ever actually happened at all. And it would hardly be rational to be offended and feel lied to upon finding out that, in fact, there never actually lived an old man who had to fib to his sons in order to get them to leave a burning house. It would entirely miss the point of the parable—and be quite ironic—to read this story as if it were a faithful description of real historical events. The story, of course, is nothing more than a skillful means for conveying a much more important and deeper truth, namely, the doctrine of skillful means itself. Yet not all stories in religious texts are so easily put aside. It is one thing for the truth about the historicity of events in a parable to be hung in suspension. No one seriously concerns themselves with whether there really was such an old man, or whether his house really was lost to a fire, and so on. It is understood that the very nature of a parable is to point to a different kind of truth, which makes the question of the historicity of the events irrelevant. But other stories in the Sutras, along with stories in the Koran and stories in the New Testament, tend to be treated quite differently by their readers. These stories are not mere stories, but purported eyewitness accounts. They are regarded as historical records of what really happened in a real and specific time and place in human history. Accordingly, the readers of these latter stories tend to be quite attached to the question of whether what they are reading is an authentic record of historical events or whether it is a fabrication. One of the substantive lessons of the Lotus Sutra is that at least some of what has traditionally been regarded as true and literal description of reality, namely, some of the core teachings of early Buddhist scriptures, is not exactly complete and accurate, but rather was taught by the Buddha as skillful means for helping an immature generation of disciples progress on the path of enlightenment. Just as the old man fabricates in order to lead his sons from the burning house, it is suggested that the Buddha taught the incomplete path



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of the Arhat, not because it was in truth the most glorious and final goal of Budd­hist practice, but because it was the path most fitting and most practical for those particular seekers. As the old man accommodates the limitations of his little children by describing and enticing with gifts that will never actually be possessed, but thereby saves their very lives, so the Buddha accommodates his teachings to the particular character of his disciples. Kierkegaard though was a thoroughly Western Christian, of course, not a Buddhist. So he does not use the language of “skillful means.” He does, however, discuss being “deceived into the truth” by means of “indirect communication.”63 These concepts are used in a twofold way. On one side of the coin, Kierkegaard as author, by means of a variety of pseudonyms and other literary devices, uses deception and indirect communication in order to free the reader to become a singular individual and take responsibility for the reader’s own life. On the other side, it is God himself that deceives into the truth by revealing himself, not directly, but paradoxically as the incognito. In order to comprehend Kierkegaard’s conception of religious truth, what Kierkegaard often refers to as “essential truth,”64 it will be helpful to look at each of these two sides of the coin in turn. First, then, Kierkegaard as author wants to deceive his reader “into the truth”—truth not as something one proclaims or maintains, but as a state of being in which one lives and moves. If the most important truths were propositional, Kierkegaard would simply state the truth directly. But essential truth is not of this type. Rather, we are dealing here with a subjective, existential reality—a truth that one inheres in rather than a doctrine that one adheres to. Kierkegaard, accordingly, does not attempt to objectivize the truth by presenting it directly, but instead “hides” the truth between the lines of the text in such a way that the reader must actively earn and work for the truth. Kierkegaard is writing for readers who do not simply want to be told what to believe and how to behave, but readers who diligently seek to make sense of the truth for themselves. Through the use of various pseudonyms and other techniques, Kierkegaard as author purposefully and explicitly sets his “authority” aside. His various works and manuscripts—pseudonymous and signed alike—do not contain “the truth,” nor even serve as a map to the truth, but are nothing more than “occasions” through which essential truth might be felt and beheld when the reader engages them with the right comportment. Like Socratic virtue, essential religious truth cannot be taught. Thus, rather than teaching the truth directly, or even pretending as if he himself were somehow “in the truth” in a way that rest of humanity is not, Kierkegaard plays the role of Socratic midwife. He facilitates the birth of truth in the souls of his readers, but makes no claim to provide it.

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Where, then, does the truth come from and how does one come into the truth? Here we meet the other side of the coin: the incognito. God cannot reveal himself directly, because that would presuppose that the condition to receive the truth is in order.65 But this is not the case. Knowledge of things as they are in themselves is inaccessible for finite human beings. Any judgment one makes about reality is necessarily limited by the conceptual framework through which one makes sense of immediate intuitions. Kierkegaard, like Kant66 before him, denies that human beings are capable of any sort of “intellectual intuition” whereby reality itself could become immediately present to the mind without any sort of conceptual schema getting in the way. The Kantian claim that such knowledge belongs “only to the original being, never to one that is dependent as regards both its existence and its intuition,”67 for example, receives echo in Climacus’s protest against Hegel in the Postscript: “Existence itself is a system—for God, but it cannot be a system for any existing [existerende] spirit.”68 For human beings there is a gap between thought and being that can never be closed. Finite existence in time and space inextricably interferes. In addition to the Kantian conception of human beings as radically finite, Kierkegaard also draws attention to a further, even more damning complication in the ability of human beings to receive essential truth, namely the problem of sin. In addition to the natural limitations of human finitude, the human mind also suffers from what the Lutheran and Reformed traditions have identified as the “noetic effects of sin,” and what Merold Westphal has developed under the heading of “sin as an epistemological category.”69 Like Luther and St. Paul before him, Kierkegaard’s Climacus argues that human beings have a fundamental unnatural tendency to distort and misrepresent reality as it is in itself in order to serve their own perverted agendas. Human beings lack the truth not just because of the finite conditions of being human. Human beings are in untruth as a result of their own volition.70 The “infinite qualitative difference” between God and humankind is not just that God is infinite and human beings finite, but that God is holy and that human beings are sinful.71 The result of this lack of condition for receiving the truth is that human beings can only come into the truth by means of a God-initiated act of revelation. But because of the human tendency to manipulate, coopt and distort the truth, the revelation must always be indirect. Otherwise the truth of divine reality would be so overwhelming that it could not be meaningfully comprehended and appropriated by us poor, finite, and broken creatures, and accordingly, would be either, at best, unappreciated, or worse, actively twisted and resisted. The essential religious truth never simply stands bare and naked



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before our eyes, but hides behind layers and veils—“we see in a mirror, dimly . . . know only in part.”72 In addition to the emphasis on the practical and subjective that is shared by the Buddhist and Kierkegaardian conceptions of essential religious truth, there is the notion that the present state of religious knowledge is always partial and incomplete, and thus eschatologically open, to future fulfillment. The truth of Gautama Buddha is not a truth taught for all time and all people, but tailored specifically to the proclivities and temperaments of his hearers. For Kierkegaard, the creeds and doctrines of Christian theology, likewise, are not the final arbiter of faith, but indirect expressions of truths beyond human comprehension. “Christianity is not a doctrine, but . . . an existencecommunication.”73 The doctrines are not the truth laid bare, but an occasion for encounter. If essential truth is subjectivity, then the primary thing is not the what of religious doctrine, but the how of religious faith. “If only the how of this relation is in the truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth.”74 And if religious doctrines are but upaya, skillful means for leading one to essential truth, then there is no obvious necessity that the small-t truths communicated by doctrines—which are from another point of view untruths—be consistent with one another. One can be equally “in the truth” as the other even though the one holds and maintains a different doctrinal truth than the other. So a faithful Christian, for example, can passionately, fervently—and therefore correctly—maintain that there is a Creator God who exists independently of his creation and Heaven and Hell are everlasting, eternal destinations for the faithful and the wicked. And a pious Buddhist can maintain passionately and fervently—and therefore correctly—that there is only dependent arising and that there is nothing in Heaven or Earth that is eternal, not even God and the soul. And though the two on the surface seem to be in conflict, both the Christian and the Buddhist may well be, in the essentially religious sense, equally in the truth. Subjectivism and the Threat of Relativism Having to this point defended an existentialist reading of Kierkegaard’s conception of faith and truth as subjectivity, two clarifications are in order. First, nothing that has been argued thus far should be taken to imply that Kierke­ gaard altogether disregards the notion of objective truth. There is no disputing that some propositions are objectively true, such as that one and one are two, or that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Rather, Kierkegaard’s emphasis upon subjectivity applies exhaustively and exclusively to essential religious

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truth. In other words, while it is by no means disputed that there is a fact of the matter about whether or not historical event x has objectively taken place, or whether or not doctrine x is objectively true, it is denied that such objective truths should play any central role in the life of faith. Second, while it is maintained that adherence to the what of belief is irrelevant to the how of faith, this claim should not be taken to imply “anything goes” in matters of faith. In one sense, the slogan that “it does not matter what you believe as long as you are sincere” captures concisely the spirit of the existential reading of Kierkegaardian faith. But it should not be pressed too far. That is, nothing contained herein should have been taken to suggest that the what of faith can be just anything. When a physicist, speaking in a specific context, says that light is made up of particles, the scientist describes reality and says something quite useful, even as the claim is really only part of the story. In a different context, it would be better to treat light as a wave. When a biologist says that some particular virus can live for over four hours in the air, the biologist says something true and meaningful; though in a different context it could be equally true and useful to say that viruses are nonliving organisms, which claims again appear to be incompatible. Analogously, the claim of a Christian that God became human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ or that Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity may not describe reality in the fashion of direct one-to-one correspondence, but this does not imply that such claims do not describe reality at all or that just any claim would serve just as well in their place. Rather, religious truth claims can be taken to describe reality in the way that the statement “The average American family has 2.3 children” describes reality. From one perspective and in one context it is useful and true, although speaking from within another perspective and context, it is nonsense to regard any family as having three-tenths of a child. Of course, I do not mean to imply here that the claims of religion and the claims of science are identical kinds of claims, or even that usefulness as skillful means is and ought to be the sole criteria by which truth claims should be judged. Rather, the lesson here is just this, namely, that just as the rejection of naïve realism with respect to scientific discourse need not lead ineluctably to “anything goes” relativism, so the prioritization of the how over the what with respect to religious discourse need not lead inevitably to abandonment of all objectivity whatsoever. While the what of religion can surely be more than one thing from the pluralist perspective, this does not entail that the what can be just anything.75 The adoption of the Kierkegaardian understanding of truth as subjectivity does not imply full-blown relativism any more



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than the physicist’s adoption of the particle-wave duality implies that light is accurately described in just any way whatsoever. Kierkegaard’s framework for understanding religious claims, accordingly, is well-suited to providing a solution to the problem of conflicting truth claims that at once avoids any kind of dogmatic prioritization of one set of claims over another, while also avoiding full-blown relativism. The same can be said of the Buddhist doctrine of upaya. On the one hand, application of the doctrine of upaya to the problem of religious diversity gives us a useful way of making sense of the conflicting truth-claims of equally good religions. But this does not necessarily entail that just any religious truth-claim is as equally useful as the next. The old man in our story, after all, could not have effectively lured his sons from the burning building with just any nonsense. Likewise, it is only those doctrines that deceive into the truth that have essential religious value. Any other doctrine is just plain false. However, it is recognized that sidestepping the problem of conflicting truth-claims in this way leaves us with a different problem: what is the criterion by which to distinguish the valuable from the worthless, true religion from false religion? Surely not just every remotely religious claim that has ever been made is as equally edifying and useful for leading to the truth as any other. Nor is a passion for just any value or set of values properly religious. So how is the truth for me to be appropriated and by what standard? Kierkegaard does, I think, furnish us with a kind of answer. Kierkegaard’s existentialist answer to the problem of the criterion is the subject of the following chapter. Notes   1. Both religious exclusivism and soteriological inclusivism maintain the position that there is exactly one true or best religion, but differ with respect to soteriological concerns. Religious exclusivists, sometimes called “particularists,” hold that only the faithful adherents of the one true religion are on the right path for attaining final salvation and/or full spiritual liberation. Soteriological inclusivism, on the other hand, maintains that some number of those outside the fold of the one true religion will nonetheless be saved or liberated in the end. Whereas religious exclusivism tends to be essentially antagonistic toward other religions, seeing them as wholly false and misleading spiritual paths, soteriological inclusivism tends to see the faithful seekers of religious traditions as fellow sojourners, or as one Catholic theologian dubs them, “anonymous Christians,” who are as of yet invincibly ignorant of the truth. See Karl Rahner, “Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,” in Christianity and Other Religions: Selected Readings, ed. John Hick and Brian Hebblethwaite (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001). For a Buddhist take on soteriological inclusivism, it is useful to consider the view of these matters as held by the current Dalai Lama. On the one hand, it is maintained that “. . . moksha or nirvana is only explained in the Buddhist scriptures, and

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is achieved only through Buddhist practice.” His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso Dalai Lama XIV, “‘Religious Harmony’ and Extracts from the Bodhgaya Interviews,” in Christianity through Non-Christian Eyes, ed. Paul Griffiths (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990), 169. Yet, he also acknowledges, “while Buddhism represents the best path for me . . . the same will be true of Christianity for Christians.” Ethics for the New Millennium (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 226. One commentator has suggested that the absolutism expressed in the first claim and the radical tolerance of the latter statement are able to be able to held together for the Dalai Lama by reference to the Buddhist doctrines of reincarnation and skillful means (upaya): “From a Buddhist perspective there is no hurry. The ultimate truth can wait .  .  . there are many future lives and very few of us, Buddhists included, will attain enlightenment in this life, or even the next. Moreover, the Dalai Lama holds that just as the Buddha taught many teachings within Buddhism to suit those at different levels, it is appropriate for a Buddhist . . . to see other religions as teachings of the Buddha for those in different circumstances and situations.” Paul Williams, “Some Dimensions of the Recent Work of Raimundo Panikkar: A Buddhist Perspective,” Religious Studies 27, no. 4 (1991): 520. This use and understanding of the doctrine of upaya will be discussed further in relation to Kierkegaard’s understanding of indirect communication and divine revelation below.   2. Accordingly, the label “religious skepticism” is here used broadly to describe not only naturalistic atheism and strict agnosticism, but any theory of religious diversity that would disregard religious experience as mere illusion or include a total reduction of religious phenomena to personal psychology, conventions of culture, or the practical utility of promoting community and morality. Likewise, if and insofar as religious anti-realism or religious relativism deny the reality of absolute truth or entail that religious truths are no more than subjective and arbitrarily formed beliefs, these views should also be distinguished from religious pluralism here defined as well.   3. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 236.  4. See Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).  5. JP, 3:2877.   6. John 14:6.   7. Harold A. Netland, Dissonant Voices: Religious Pluralism and the Question of Truth (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1997), 160.  8. Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, 36.  9. JP, 1:208. 10. I Corinthians 1:18–25. 11. CUP, 203. 12. SLW, 440. 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980), 31e. 14. The danger of losing sight of what is essential is vividly illustrated via a well-known story about the Buddha. The Buddha is approached by the astute and venerable disciple Malunkyaputta, who has made up his mind that he will leave the



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monastic sangha if the Buddha does not impart his wisdom regarding various matters of metaphysical speculation on which the Buddha had heretofore maintained silence, for instance, whether the world is eternal or not, whether it is spatially infinite or not, whether the soul and the body are the same or different, whether the Tathagata exists or does not exist after death, and the like. The Buddha replies to the inquisitive monk with a parable: Malunkyaputta, it is as if a man were pierced by an arrow that was thickly smeared with poison and his friends and relations, his kith and kin, were to procure a physician and surgeon. He might speak thus: “I will not draw out this arrow until I know of the man who pierced me whether he is a noble or a brahman or a merchant or a worker.” He might speak thus: “I will not draw out this arrow until I know the name and clan of the man who pierced me . . . until I know of the man who pierced me whether he is tall or short or middling in height . . . until I know of the bow from which I was pierced whether it was a spring-bow or a cross-bow . . . until I know of the shaft from which I was pierced with what kind of sinews it was encased: whether those of a cow or buffalo or deer or monkey.” From “Lesser Discourse to Malunkyaputta,” in The Middle Length Sayings II, ed. I. B. Horner (London: Luzac and Company, 1957), 99–100.

Such a man, the Buddha goes on to explain, would die before he were treated if all these irrelevant speculations had to be fulfilled before he finally got on with the pressing task of removing the arrow. By analogy, the Buddha implies that it is infinitely more important that a human being should be concerned with spiritual liberation than with fruitless philosophical investigation into speculative matters. Malunkyaputta’s mistake, then, can be characterized as a failure and unwillingness to realize that pure metaphysical speculation, whether concerning the metaphysical nature of the universe or the nature of the Tathagata’s nirvana, holds no positive soteriological value and, in fact, is a distraction from the vital task of spiritual self-transformation. In a reflection on the Buddha’s teaching in this regard, contemporary Christian theologian and philosopher John Hick puts the matter thus: “[L]et us hear the fundamental point—which means in the case of the Buddha’s teaching the soteriological point—which he was concerned to make .  .  . namely, that to know the answers to these questions is not necessary for liberation and that to treat them as though they were soteriologically important will only hinder our advance toward liberation.” John Hick, Disputed Questions in Theology and the Philosophy of Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 106. In other words, by getting wrapped up in vain philosophical disputes about matters that in truth have no real bearing on concrete existence, we only accomplish putting ourselves at risk of spiraling yet further into suffering and despair. 15. Jacques Derrida, “Epoché and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge, 2005). 16. JP, 5:5100. 17. CUP, 380. 18. Philippians 2:5. 19. Matthew 16:24.

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20. CUP, 203. 21. PC, 208. 22. CUP, 423. 23. Ibid., 404. 24. Martin J. Matuštík, Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 21. It should also be noted in this connection that while we do find grounds for a distinction between faith and belief in Kierkegaard’s own writings, the terminology is not Kierkegaard’s own. The Danish word for the English “faith” is tro, which also translates to the English “belief.” The result is that there are many places in the English translations which use the word “belief” to describe what is in this chapter defined as “faith.” 25. James 2:19. 26. For Kierkegaard as for the James, faith is inseparable from work and the work of Abraham’s offering up of Isaac as recounted in Genesis 22 is taken as the paradigmatic example of faith. See FT and James 2:20–22. It is noteworthy in the present context that Rahab, a pagan prostitute, is also considered a paradigm of the work of faith in James 2:25. See also Hebrews 11:31 where Rahab is counted among the heroes and heroines of faith. 27. CUP, 379–80. 28. Ibid., 17. 29. Ibid., 203. 30. Ibid., 19–57. 31. Ibid., 17. 32. Ibid., 199. 33. Ibid., 17. 34. Ibid., 199. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 203. 37. Ibid., 21–43. 38. Ibid., 23. 39. PF, 99. 40. CUP, 31. 41. Climacus clarifies elsewhere that “the believing Christian both has and uses his understanding, respects the universally human, does not explain someone’s not becoming a Christian as a lack of understanding.” While it is true in a sense that the Christian “believes against the understanding,” this should not be taken to imply that the Christian believes “nonsense against the understanding,” but only that “becomes aware of the incomprehensible . . . and relates himself to it” (ibid., 568). 42. See also CA, 151 where the inwardness and earnestness of faith are again explicitly linked with certitude. 43. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 299. 44. One might wonder whether Dostoyevsky is here advocating the very crude irrationalism and fanaticism just refuted. However, we would do well to distinguish between the passion of the fundamentalist zealot on the one hand, and the passion of

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25

faith on the other. The latter is by no means thrown out with former. The passion of the zealot is based on an irrational confidence on some “simple historical fact.” The passion of faith, on the other hand, has nothing to do with intellectual assent to dubious historical claims. Rather, as the corollary of the risk of faith, this latter passion is a practical passion, based on imitation of Christ as the paradigm for action. It is presumably this latter sense in which Dostoyevsky would remain passionately committed to Christ. Wittgenstein is also useful here: Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 32e.

Or again, Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this: not, however, because it concerns “universal truths of reason”! Rather, because historical proof (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular acceptance-as-true, not something else. Ibid.

45. Robert Adams, “Kierkegaard’s Arguments against Objective Reasoning in Religion,” in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 46. I am referring specifically to evidentialist apologetics here. Evidentialism is just the view that the rationality of a belief is determined by the quality of the believer’s evidence for the belief. So “anti-apologetics” here implies any and all attempts to “debunk” Christianity as irrational on the basis of its dubious historical claims and/or its lack of rational argument. Conversely, “apologetics” is the attempt to establish the rationality of Christianity by debunking the debunkers (so-called “negative apologetics”), as well as putting forward the case for the truth of Christianity on the basis of either historical or rational evidence (so-called “positive apologetics”). 47. Notice how all of this is quite a bit different than, say, Plantinga’s nonevidentialist apologetics, even where it sounds similar. Plantinga argues that we can justifiably believe in God without argument. However, Plantinga also allows that defeaters could dissuade such belief, and likewise, that positive evidence could strengthen such belief. See Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Climacus’s break with evidentialism is more radical. Defeaters cannot detract from faith since evidence can have no bearing one way or the other. This more radical break is what is intended in and through the approximation argument. 48. Impassioned involvement with oneself and the world is the core of what Kierkegaard means by inwardness. Notice that inwardness is not simply passionate self-involvement; it is also passionate involvement toward others. Inwardness turned inward only is a demonic psychological disorder, which Kierkegaard refers to as “in-

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closing reserve” (CA, 123–35; SLW, 427–29). Real inwardness is inwardness turned inward and outward, which is why Kierkegaard places so much emphasis on love as the primus motor of the Christian life (JP, 3:2383; WL 154–74). For a defense of the view that “subjectivity in Kierkegaard implies corporeality and temporality” and that real inwardness “is inwardness in acting and understanding, thus in relating to the world,” see Arne Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Jeanette B. L. Knox (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008). The quotations here are from Grøn’s “Preface to the English edition,” xiv. Love will be a topic of discussion in future chapters of the present work, particularly chapter 6. 49. John 18:33–19:16. 50. Matthew 27:24. 51. CUP, 229–30. 52. PC, 205. 53. Ibid. 54. CUP, 201. 55. Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette: Purdue University, 1996), 119. See also “The Importance of Overcoming Metaphysics for the Life of Faith,” Modern Theology 23, no. 2 (2007). 56. Westphal, Becoming a Self, 119. 57. JP, 2:1405. 58. CUP, 212. 59. Ibid., 203. 60. Ibid., 562, 566–67. Climacus ridicules the “revivalists” and the “superorthodox” who “catch a glimpse” behind the veil of finitude and then go on to preach enthusiastically as if they have been handed the whole of reality. The enthusiast is rightly laughed at by the “ungodly” world, “especially when he begins to glimpse, because then he is actually ludicrous.” This passage complements Climacus’s earlier remarks on fanaticism as discussed above. 61. The following retelling of “The Parable of the Burning House” has been adapted from The Lotus Sutra, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 56–58. 62. There is a potential concern about whether the old man in our story adheres to the standard of right speech as found in the noble eightfold path of the Buddha. However, if “right speech” is read as “suitable” speech as opposed to epistemically correct speech, then right speech doesn’t necessarily equal speaking honestly about the facts, but is rather saying the right thing on the right occasion. See Nicholas F. Gier, The Virtue of Nonviolence: From Gautama to Gandhi (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 78. 63. POV, 53–54. 64. CUP, 199n. 65. POV, 54. 66. It is worth noting that Kant’s familiar distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, which is presupposed here, also serves as the basis of Hick’s solu-



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tion to the problem of conflicting truth-claims. See Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, 240–46. 67. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B72. 68. CUP, 118. 69. Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 105–25. 70. PF, 15. 71. Ibid., 47. 72. I Corinthians 13:12. 73. CUP, 379–80. 74. Ibid., 199. 75. In fact, Climacus goes so far as to claim that the how of faith “can fit only one thing, the absolute paradox” (CUP, 611). While I am in agreement on the basic point that the how of faith restrains the what, that is, that the proper object of faith cannot be just anything, Climacus’s apparent suggestion that true faith fits only with Christianity is baseless. As it is illustrated in the second part of the present work, Kierkegaard’s own religious exclusivism is due primarily to prejudice and lack of knowledge about non-Christian religions. See especially chapters 4 and 5.

2 The Problem of the Criterion

A

classic problem in epistemology, the problem of the criterion, contends that in order for any belief to be justified we need to establish a criterion of truth. But in order to validate the criterion, we need a second criterion, and a third, ad infinitum. Or, we can claim that the criterion shows itself to be true, but then we are trapped in epistemic circularity. The progenitors of this problem, the ancient Pyrrhonists, opted for skepticism, ultimately concluding that no beliefs are justified. The classical formulation of the problem is put forward by Sextus Empiricus as follows: [I]n order to decide the dispute which has arisen about the criterion, we must possess an accepted criterion by which we shall be able to judge the dispute; and in order to possess an accepted criterion, the dispute about the criterion must first be decided. And when the argument thus reduces itself to a form of circular reasoning the discovery of the criterion becomes impracticable, since we do not allow them to adopt a criterion by assumption, while if they offer to judge the criterion by a criterion we force them to a regress ad infinitum.1

It is tempting to dismiss the skeptic as an obnoxious child who doesn’t know when to quit asking why. Consider, for example, the strategy endorsed by comedian Louis C. K., known for capitalizing on awkward human interactions, deep pessimism, and the horribly inappropriate manner in which he candidly expresses frustrations with his own children: You can’t answer a kid’s question. They don’t accept any answer. A kid never goes, “Oh, thanks. I get it.” . . . They just keep coming—more questions: “Why? — 29 —

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Why? Why?”; ’til you don’t even know who the [bleep] you are anymore at the end of the conversation. It’s an insane deconstruction.

C. K. goes on to recount a recent experience with his beloved daughter, “Papa, why can’t we go outside?” Well, ’cause it’s raining. “Why?” Well, water’s coming out of the sky. “Why?” Because it was in a cloud. “Why?” Well, clouds form when there’s, uh . . . vapor. “Why?” I don’t know. . . . I don’t know any more things. Those are all the things I know. “Why?” . . . This goes on for hours and hours and it gets so weird and abstract. . . . Because some things are and some things are not. “Why?” Well, because things that are not can’t be. “Why?”2

It is tempting to respond to the skeptic by cutting the Gordian knot in the same Alexandrian manner in which C. K. eventually responds to the child: “Eat your French fries, you little shit!” Aristotle, who argues that you can only really answer a skeptic with silence, would seem to endorse the strategy of dismissal as well. “It is absurd to seek to give an account of our views” to the skeptic. “For such a man . . . is from the start no better than a vegetable,” says Aristotle.3 Concerning skepticism about the principle of noncontradiction, Avicenna’s answer to the skeptic exhibits even more frustration: “As for the obstinate, he must be plunged into fire, since fire and non-fire are identical. Let him be beaten, since suffering and not suffering are the same.”4 Whether dealing with an inquisitive toddler or an obstinate skeptic, answering the problem of the criterion can be maddening. So it isn’t at all surprising to find such solutions to skepticism put forward by apostles of common sense from Aristotle to Roderick Chisholm5 and G. E. Moore, who famously “refuted” skepticism about the external world by holding up his right hand—“here is one hand”—and then raising his left—“here is another.”6 It is equally frustrating, however, when we encounter reasoning such as the following: “The Bible must be true; all Scripture is God-breathed, and it is impossible for God to lie.” I grant the validity of your argument. But how do you know that the premises are true? “Well, the Bible says so. Just have a look at II Timothy 3:16 and Hebrews 6:18!” The argument smacks of blatant circularity, of course. Only a fool would be taken in by its inane, yet all too common, reasoning. In the case of the Bible thumper, there is a different kind of obnoxious childishness at play. The fundamental problem of circular reasoning, which is the other horn of our dilemma, is in not asking why. This is also the pitfall of any dogmatism that seeks to resolve the problem of the criterion with an appeal to commonsense experience. The purported solution is nothing more than epistemic circularity, which relies on the very faculties in question



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in order to demonstrate the reliability of those faculties to provide us with knowledge. But if we don’t take seriously the circularity of the Bible thumper, why then should we take seriously the circular reasoning of the apostles of common sense? Criteriology and Subjectivity Where does Kierkegaard stand in relation to the problem of the criterion? On the one hand, the sort of epistemological puzzle being considered here is likely to be dismissed as too much academic bluster. One can imagine Kierkegaard putting aside all the pretense of all-too-theoretical skepticism and asking, “Seriously now, what kind of stupid sap doesn’t even know whether he has hands? Are we supposed to take this insanity seriously?” In at least one crucial respect, accordingly, I would venture to say that the Kierkegaardian approach is firmly in line with the commonsense approach that runs from Aristotle to Reformed epistemology. At the very least, we have no good reason to think Kierkegaard had any serious doubts about the truth of commonsense propositions such as “I have two hands,” “the world is more than five minutes old,” and “other people have minds similar to my own.” Moreover, he appears to have believed these things despite being familiar with Pyrrhonist philosophical puzzles.7 We can also point to indicators that suggest Kierkegaard maintained that the only viable response to skepticism is mockery. He heaps much ridicule upon “absentminded” idealists, for example, who would take their own speculations so seriously they forget their own existence.8 We can easily envision Kierkegaard extending this derision to all academic doubters who would take their philosophical tinkering so seriously as to forget they have hands. On the other hand, given his disdain for the opinions of “the crowd,”9 there is equally good reason to believe that Kierkegaard, like Kant before him, would see direct reliance upon common sense in order to solve tricky skeptical puzzles as “but an appeal to the opinion of the multitude, of whose applause the philosopher is ashamed, while the popular charlatan glories and confides in it.”10 For all his reputation as an irrationalist, Kierkegaard would most likely see the attempt to cut through the Gordian knot of our problem with common sense as blatantly circular and not much less comical than the skepticism it seeks to subvert. There is also reason to place Kierkegaard on the side of the skeptic insofar as the skeptic assumes that, at least in the broad scheme of things, that is, where it really matters, we are always ever far, far away from closing in on the truth—especially when the question of truth is extended beyond trivial and

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pedestrian propositions about hands and the existence of other minds. When the truth is understood to have any degree of substantive philosophical, theological, or existential import, then the truth is light years away, and there is an unbridgeable gap between thought and being that no amount of speculating can ever dream of closing.11 Albert Einstein famously derided common sense as the faculty that tells us that the earth is flat and “that layer of prejudice laid down in the mind before the age of eighteen.”12 Viewed in this light, common sense is really nothing more than an “acoustical illusion.”13 Like a college sophomore who really knows nothing precisely on account of already knowing it all, common sense merely repeats back to us what we ourselves already say and believe about the way reality really is and then, when it echoes back, we mistakenly hear it as if it were something greater than our own voice. This problem of acoustical illusion is why the crowd is regarded as untruth, and why Kierkegaard insists that it is so deeply misguided to follow Danish Hegelianism in its confusion of the voice of the people (vox populi) with the voice of God (vox Dei).14 When it comes right down to it, common sense may speak for the majority, but the problem with truth by democracy is precisely in how often the majority gets it wrong. Accordingly, just as common sense at its best has no more than a limited, heuristic role when it comes to positing scientific hypotheses, it is even more inadequate for engaging in serious philosophy, and especially, philosophy of religion, which is the main business of Kierkegaard’s corpus and the occasion for the present work. What we call in epistemological perspective “the truth” is from a theological perspective what Kierkegaard calls by the name “God.” And just as God is “absolutely different,”15 so the truth is always hiding just beyond the grasp of knowledge. In this, the Pyrrhonist skeptic—along with philosophers such as the “ignorant” Socrates, who knows only that he doesn’t know anything—are no doubt on to something, and ironically, this puts them more in the truth than those sophists who would claim to possess it.16 Consider also the all-important role of paradox in Kierkegaard’s philosophy, which confounds the understanding and makes it go topsy-turvy.17 Or consider also the notion of faith as a “leap,”18 not to mention the muchdiscussed teleological suspension of the ethical in Johannes de Silentio’s infamous Fear and Trembling. Viewed in recollection of these familiar themes, Kierkegaard comes off as anything but an apostle of common sense. Rather, we get a strong impression that, in the end, Kierkegaard’s philosophy represents a profound distrust of common sense, and so cannot make appeal to it in order to solve the problem of the criterion.



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All of this leaves us in an awkward position. On the one hand, following the sound practical advice of the philosophers of common sense, there comes a point where we just can’t keep throwing ourselves down the rabbit hole. The skeptical view of the world, with all of its childish questioning about whether we really have hands and whether trees in the forest continue to exist when no one is around to observe them, must ultimately be rejected and is rejected by those of us sane enough not to be taken in hook, line, and sinker by philosophy’s allure. This includes, of course, the existentialist Kierkegaard, who ultimately finds skepticism to be deserving of ridicule. Yet, on the other hand, it seems that the skeptic isn’t really so ridiculous after all when it comes to the invaluable role skeptical arguments play in reminding us that we are not God. On this score Kierkegaard embraces skepticism and reminds us that for God and God alone “existence itself is a system.”19 Accordingly, it is imperative that we distinguish between divine knowledge and merely human “knowledge.” In the parlance of Platonic epistemology, it is maintained that knowledge in the sense of “justified true belief,” or genuine episteme, is ultimately illusory and too slippery for human creatures.20 Such knowledge is surely a good regulative ideal, but it is not something we should ever fool ourselves into thinking we will have ever fully grasped. Along with Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus we would do well to admit, “I am only a poor existing human being who neither eternally nor divinely nor theocentrically is able to observe the eternal but must be content with existing”21 And with St. Paul we ought to confess that “we see in a mirror, dimly .  .  . know only in part”22 In the end, we poor existing individuals must somehow manage to get by with what Plato calls opinion, or doxa. Opinion may well include everything from sound commonsense judgments to that which Hegel called “reason” and that which modern biologists and physicists call “facts.” But, despite occasional protests to the contrary, it is safe to say that all such “knowledge” falls short of knowledge in the full-blown philosophical sense of justified true belief. That is, we are never quite fully justified in believing that any one particular take on reality is the final product of absolute knowledge, the theory of everything, or, I would add, the one true religion. Except in the thinnest systems of rudimentary logic and mathematics, a priori knowledge is always either inconsistent or incomplete. Any other matters of fact deserving of the label of “objective knowledge” are true, yet only as an approximation of uncertain probability.23 Of course, Kierkegaard knows well that doubt cannot be sustained indefinitely. In fact, he wrote the book on it, namely, Johannes Climacus, whose Latin subtitle translates as “everything must be doubted” but whose conclusion is that such an endeavor is ultimately absurd.24

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All of this makes the role of subjectivity inescapable. Where rationality runs out we must ultimately make an inward “leap”—not a blind leap, but an eyes-wide-open leap. For the Kierkegaardian hermeneutics of appropriation, “truth is subjectivity.”25 In other words, the buck stops here, with me, “that single individual”26 In the end, there is no final earthly authority, no ultimate epistemological principle, and no metaphysical first philosophy that can decide what to believe on my behalf. In the words of Kierkegaard, “doubt is conquered not by the system but by faith.”27 The Threat of Subjectivism If truth is subjectivity—if it really all just boils down to faith—then what’s to stop me from believing whatever I want? The threat of subjectivism lurks here. If we allow ourselves to rely upon subjective passions and inward feelings when deciding what to believe, we take more than a little risk. We might likely find ourselves believing things not because they are true or conform to evidence, but because they are self-serving, easy to swallow, or conform to the thinking of cherished traditions. If truth is subjectivity, there are no guarantees. Or worse, anything goes; all is free and imaginative play. So-called “epistemological evidentialists” from empiricist David Hume to new atheists Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins rightly cringe at the thought that it’s a good idea to go around believing whatever it is one wants to believe on the basis of nothing more than gut feeling, fear, and wishful thinking. W. K. Clifford, for example, conveys a familiar story about a ship-owner who, in an attempt to avoid going through the trouble of getting his rickety ship inspected before sending her out to sea, convinced himself that she would do just fine.28 Indeed, in hopeful anticipation of the money that would be coming in upon delivery of the ship’s goods, he actually and firmly believed that she really would return safely. Those of us looking more objectively at the situation, however, can already predict what came next. The ship went down and all of the crew with her. On the upside, the ship-owner did get to collect to his insurance money. So maybe it’s a win-win. But it’s not win-win, of course—at least not for the crew. The moral of Clifford’s story is that it really does matter what one believes. The old and tragically familiar adage “it does not matter what you believe as long as you are sincere” is wildly out of tune with reality. It matters to the crew’s friends and family that the ship-owner believed his ship to be sound even though he didn’t bother to look for evidence to back up his claim by having the ship inspected. And even if there is not much love lost, it also matters to the insur-



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ance company as well. Believing the wrong things all too often has disastrous and, in this particular case, even deadly consequences. How then can we take Kierkegaard’s claim that subjectivity is truth seriously? Who in their right mind would believe such nonsense? Subjectivity is Untruth If we take the Kierkegaardian approach to subjectivity seriously—deadly seriously—and not just in superficial and piecemeal fashion, then we must also recognize another, equally Kierkegaardian truth that moderates and regulates the claim that truth is subjectivity. That truth is subjectivity is only an entry-level truth; it is the truth of what Kierkegaard calls “religiousness A,” which says that “objective uncertainty”29 forces and requires us to turn constantly and passionately inward. As we venture further inward, however, we hit upon “religiousness B,” which is based upon the acknowledgement of an even deeper truth, namely, that “subjectivity is untruth.”30 In other words, the Kierkegaardian hermeneutics of appropriation advocated thus far needs to be steadily tempered by an equally vigorous hermeneutics of suspicion. While subjectivity in its immediate state does indeed have a tendency to be guided by fear and wishful thinking, which in the case of our ship-owner leads blindly astray toward needless and senseless suffering, true subjectivity is the subjectivity of conscience, which is never simply reactive gut-feeling and much less the Freudian superego. But rather, true conscience is always an anguished conscience and, in particular, a consciousness of sin. Accordingly, real inwardness and real subjectivity are never simply “doing what I want,” but always looking at myself with eyes wide open, examining every motive with constant regard of myself as “a suspicious character.”31 While Kierkegaard sides with commonsense dogmatists insofar as it is acknowledged that evidentialist questioning cannot go on forever lest we never end up believing anything at all,32 Kierkegaard himself is by no means dogmatic. The claim to truth—even a claim as simple as G. E. Moore’s refutation of idealism via the demonstration of his own two hands—must never be completely and fully regarded as warranted or justified lest we complacently and comfortably start believing whatever we want on the basis of “obviousness.” Part of the problem with obviousness as a criterion for truth is that what is obvious to me is not necessarily obvious to you, and even more problematically, what turns out to be obvious is all too often self-serving and selfcongratulatory. Whereas it’s obvious to liberals that Republicans should be blamed for the subprime mortgage crisis, it’s likewise obvious to conservatives that the Democrats should be blamed. While it’s obvious to some that

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Jerusalem is their capital, it is likewise just as obvious to others that it’s their home. Accordingly, the point is conceded. Subjectivity regulated by nothing but wants and desires is a disaster waiting to happen. So it is indeed tempting to give up subjectivity and embrace objective evidence as one’s only guide. Unfortunately, however, evidence won’t do; there is never enough of it and we thus go retreating back again into infinity like obstinate two-year-olds asking why. So while evidentialists from David Hume to the new atheists clearly raise an important concern, namely, that subjectivity is all too often unreliable, the solution to abandon subjectivity in favor of objectivity is no real option. Thus, Kierkegaard opts instead to let subjectivity be regulated by conscience as the final court of appeal. Theologically speaking, one must stand “alone by himself before God”33 and pray ceaselessly, “who,” O God, “can detect their errors? Clear me from hidden faults.”34 The Criterion of Conscience But cannot a person’s conscience be so seared and dead that listening to conscience provides no good standard at all? Surely conscience can be wrong and is not always a good guide for action. Accordingly, conscience is no real sure and certain guard against selfish subjectivism. Even when one tries their damnedest to follow their conscience and most sincerely intends not to be selfish or arrogant and so on, common sense reminds us that the road to hell is well trodden by those with good intentions. Consequently, the things that need to be decided are too weighty and important; they are not matters that should be left up to arbitrary caprices of individual conscience. We need a firm rule or principle. No good Kierkegaardian can take this objection lightly. After all, we have already pointed out that while the mantra of the first half of Concluding Unscientific Postscript is that “truth is subjectivity,” this is superseded in the second half of that text with the announcement that “subjectivity is untruth.”35 Kierkegaard more than most knew the breadths and depths to which persons could go to deceive themselves. But then this is just precisely why honesty with oneself and transparency before God are so important in the first place. Kierkegaard does have faith that, if you seek “the Lord your God . . . you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul.”36 In Kierkegaard’s terms, “when the how is scrupulously rendered the what is also given.”37 But he also knows that we have within ourselves a deep and dark tendency to pretend in bad faith.



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Accordingly, the distinction between the “conscience in its immediate state” and the true conscience38 must be reiterated and reinforced. The objection is right insofar as the immediate conscience is concerned. True conscience, however, is anguished conscience; it is conscience that has constantly before it the possibility, indeed, the realization, that “in relation to God, we are always in the wrong”39 Insofar as I seek with the persistence of true conscience after the proper appropriation of the Word of God for me, then I am reading God’s Word. But our objector might persist. Using conscience as the criterion of what counts as an appropriate and good appropriation is still too dangerous—ultimately no better than “free and imaginative play” without any truly universal moral constraint. Accordingly, something other than conscience needs to regulate subjectivity and since it has now been conceded that objectivity in the form of evidence just won’t do, it is ultimately more prudent to follow the universal rules and intersubjective standards of the human community (sittlichkeit) instead. Subjectivity regulated by itself in the form of conscience is absurd. It is simply too risky to obey voices in your head when almost everyone else points in another direction. It would be sheer hubris to place the conscience of a single individual higher than the collective. This is precisely the critique of conscience levied by Hegel in “The Good and Conscience,”40 the text to which Kierkegaard’s Johannes de Silentio responds in Fear and Trembling: [I]n the Philosophy of Right, Hegel argues that the self-centeredness of conscience is dangerous. The danger is that “man holds his own will as for himself valid and authoritative.” Hegel is worried about “pure inwardness of will,” which “may possibly convert the absolute universal into mere caprice . . . may make a principle out of what is peculiar to particularity, placing it over the universal and realizing it in action. This [says Hegel] is evil.”41

It must be admitted that Hegel is in one sense correct. An ethics of conscience built on the pure inwardness of faith over against the better judgement of a community of rational beings is indeed dangerous, and bucking universally established ethical principles, especially in the case in which they have been properly grounded in a common vision according to transparent standards and with mutual recognition, would seem to entail an appeal to a subjective standard that ought rightly to be regarded as entirely out of bounds from the vantage point of the ethical community. And no less than from the vantage point of ethics, such deviations should perhaps also be prohibited as illegal by the civil servants and judges of any legitimately established state and even generally regarded as evil by any respectable priest or reasonably minded congregation of religious practitioners. Hegel certainly seems to get some-

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thing right on this score. When one devotes oneself wholly and absolutely to living in obedience to the inward call of individual conscience, there is a good chance this absolute obedience will come sharply into the conflict serving the universally regarded public interest and the intersubjectively agreed upon good of the community. Moreover, there is no objective guarantee that following one’s conscience is the right thing to do or even that following the voices in one’s head under the cover of submitting to conscience might not lead to objective harm or violence. Accordingly, to grant the highest stamp of approval to the subjective criterion of conscience, even when it publicly professes to have examined itself twice over in fear and trembling before God and with a suspicious eye toward one’s own true intentions, would nonetheless be sheer lunacy and madness from an objective point of view. It poses a real and serious threat to every system of universal value, all of the historically important systems of objective ethics, as well as the time-honored standards of morality embodied in tradition and the most reasonable commonsense distinctions between good versus evil and right versus wrong. On the other hand, however, we might also really and seriously consider, from the vantage point of the concrete subjectivity of an ethically engaged single individual, whether the danger and potential objective evil is nonetheless worth the risk. Should I, as an individual before God, suppress and ignore the sincere convictions of an anguished conscience? Should you, as an individual before God, suppress and ignore the sincere convictions of an anguished conscience? While Hegel is most certainly right that placing the single individual higher than the ethical universal is a danger, and that following through in obedience to a telos incommensurable with the whole of universal ethics invites risk, one must also be careful of settling in too comfortably. One must keep wary of becoming too compliant with the established order. If the duty to relate absolutely to the absolute telos should become abdicated for some individual, then not only is faith reduced to ethics and religion reduced to politics, but the apparent individuality of individual qua individual is abrogated and lost as well. Whereas the rock of ages is anchored in bedrock 70,000 fathoms deep, protruding through the water’s surface as a safe harbor from storms for shipwrecked sailors and stubbornly resisting pantheistic dissolution into the blue, the individual who fails to cling absolutely to some absolute telos is no pillar of stone at all. Rather, such a one is like a wave tossed about by the winds of opinion and gossip and whose ephemeral and nebulous existence ends before it even fully begins, crashing upon the rock or collapsing in upon itself and being absorbed by the surrounding seas.42 Far from attempting to play down the cost of the individual’s absolute relation to God in faith or finding a defense of subjectivity’s reasonableness from



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the vantage point of universal discourse, de Silentio does very little to quell the anxiety imposed by the ethics of conscience in the face of Hegel’s justified nervousness. He rather highlights the risk of breaking with the established ethical order. He not only admits the absurd and paradoxical nature of suspending ethics itself in the name of duty to an absolute telos, but embraces the incommensurability between the universal and the absolute and identifies the anxiety that necessarily accompanies the teleological suspension of the ethical as an invitation to the inwardness of self-reflection and an occasion for the passion of faith. Following the inspiration of Jesus’s disturbing injunction that “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple,”43 de Silentio stresses that the other side of an absolute duty to God is a merely relative relationship to everything else, including the ethical. Moreover, lest the hard teaching of Jesus and de Silentio’s strong sense of incommensurability between allegiance to God and all else should become obfuscated, the potentially violent and the socially abhorrent tendencies of a potentially unbridled and other-worldly faith are hardly ignored or watered down. To the contrary, he offers us the challenging example of Abraham, that single individual who, as the recognized father of faith in both Old and New Testaments, became properly regarded as the father of faith and concretely demonstrated his faith before God precisely in his willing obedience to the call of God, even at all cost and against his own understanding: He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt-offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?” Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together. When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the

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knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”44

Again, it must be admitted that Hegel is right. When “the voice of conscience is installed eternally in its eternal right to be the only voice,”45 the ethics of conscience is a dangerous game. Faith is a risk and “being alone with God’s Word is a dangerous matter.”46 Indeed, look what could have happened to Isaac!47 Accordingly, if faith is a dangerous game, then it is also serious business, and so if we are compelled to characterize obedience to conscience and faithfulness to the voice of God as “free and imaginative play” outside the universal strictures of the ethical, it should at once be noted that the free play of appropriation is no self-serving festivity and that, in fact, it’s quite costly. Obedience to conscience, especially obedience to conscience when the voice of conscience disagrees with all the other voices in the crowd and when one cautiously and humbly follows her conscience in fear and trembling, ever distrustful of the crowd but also and especially wary of herself as “a suspicious character”48—these things are by no means easy, of course, and this dangerous game of faith is surely not all fun and amusements. If anything, then “it is, so it must be, to have one’s hell here on earth.”49 It must be recognized that Abraham, as de Silentio portrays him, is far from easy with suspending the ethical in order to obey the command of God. He does so with much fear and trembling (hence, the title). Further, ethics for de Silentio are teleologically suspended but they are not done away with. The very notion of a teleological suspension demands that “that which is suspended is not relinquished but is preserved in the higher.” To be sure, when “duty is absolute, then the ethical is reduced to the relative. . . . [But] it does not follow that the ethical should be invalidated.”50 In other words, the teleological suspension of the ethical is not so much a matter of letting faith get away with breaking the rules, but it rather adds difficulty than subtracts. Faith is not of the rigor of the ethical life, but rather surpasses it. By what standard then are we to decide what we should believe and which religion we should follow? What is the criterion by which to distinguish the valuable from the worthless, true religion from false religion? In the face of the problem of subjectivism, we would much prefer a formula, a principle, an ineffable tablet, a tradition, and so on. But all of that must ultimately buckle to the criterion of conscience. After all, who but I could decide which principle I ought to live by or what earthly authority mediates God’s voice for me?51 Consequently, here I stand, stuck uncomfortably equidistant between a comfortable objectivism on the one hand and do-whatever-I-want-to-do subjectivism on the other. Where we are tempted to rely upon some easy rule or theory or principle or tradition in matters of faith, we must remember that



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“truth is subjectivity.” Where the formula “truth is subjectivity” tends toward self-certainty and self-reliance, conscience then demands recollection of the dictum that “subjectivity is untruth.” It is a bit of a catch-22 situation and we would, of course, like all of this to be much neater, but for better or worse, “life’s not a paragraph.”52 Notes   1. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge, 1976), 2.4.   2. Louis C. K., “Why?,” in One Night Stand (Home Box Office, 2006).  3. Aristotle, Metaphysics, in Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 1941), 1006a15.  4. Avicenna, La Métaphysique du Shifā Livres I à V (Paris: Vrin, 1978), I.8, 53.13–15. Quoted in Laurence R. Horn, “Contradiction,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2014 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta, retrieved from http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/contradiction.   5. Chisholm calls his commonsense method “particularism.” It starts with the belief that we do in fact know some particular things about the world on the basis of our commonsense experience, such as “this is a hand” and other everyday deliverances of the senses and memory. Roderick M. Chisholm, “The Problem of the Criterion,” in The Foundations of Knowing (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982).   6. G. E. Moore, “Proof of an External World,” in Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 166.   7. See, for example, PF, 81–85.  8. CUP, 100–6.   9. “[T]he crowd is untruth, the untruth of wanting to exert influence by means of the crowd, the numerical, of wanting to make the numerical the authority for what truth is” (POV, 126). 10. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Can Qualify as a Science, trans. Paul Carus (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 4.259. 11. CUP, 331–32. 12. Quoted in Ray Skinner, Relativity for Scientists and Engineers (New York: Dover, 2014), 27n. 13. POV, 123. 14. Ibid. The confusion of the divine and the human is revisited in the context of a critique of Hegel’s Christology in chapter 3 and again in the context of Kierkegaard’s critique of pantheism in chapter 6. 15. PF, 44. 16. I am thinking, of course, of Socrates’s famed account of his encounter with the oracle of Delphi and his subsequent investigation of the oracle’s claim. Plato, Apology, in The Complete Works of Plato, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 21a–23b.

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17. JP, 2:1148. 18. CUP, 100–5. 19. Ibid., 118. 20. For a remarkably concise and influential refutation of the Platonic conception of knowledge, see Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” Analysis 23 (1963). 21. CUP, 212. 22. I Corinthians 13:12. 23. See chapter 1. 24. JC, 167–72. 25. CUP, 189–206. 26. The phrase “that single individual” plays an important role in Kierkegaard’s authorship as both the “dear reader” to whom a significant number of Kierkegaard’s signed works are dedicated, as well as himself, which can be seen in his expressed desire to have the phrase engraved on his own tombstone (POV, 118). 27. JP, 1:891. Faith is a “not a knowledge but an act of freedom . . . no conclusion . . . but a resolution” (PF, 84). It is not an objective answer to the problem of the criterion, but a subjective response, which is no less true of most of the various “stances” we might take, such as materialism and empiricism or capitalism and socialism. As one self-aware empiricist acknowledges, such scientific and philosophical stances are “similar or analogous to conversion to a cause” and “cannot be simply equated with having beliefs or making assertions about what there is.” Bas C. van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 61, 48. 28. W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays (New York: Prometheus Books, 1999), 70. 29. CUP, 203, italics removed. 30. CUP, 207. The distinction between religiousness A and B is further discussed in chapter 4 of the present work. 31. FSE, 44. 32. Since evidentialism is the view that all rational beliefs must be supported by evidence, then evidentialism itself must be supported by evidence to be rational, and even if such evidence can be supplied, then it too will need to be supported by yet further evidence, and so on ad infinitum. Accordingly, when the evidentialist is held to his own standard, he finds himself “hoist with his own petard.” See Alvin Plantinga, “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1983). 33. JP, 2:2043. 34. Psalm 19:12. 35. CUP, 207. 36. Deuteronomy 4:29. 37. JP, 4:4550. 38. Ibid., 1:684. 39. EO, 2:352. 40. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 86–104.



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41. John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling (New York: Routledge, 2003), 88. The passages quoted here by Lippitt can be found in Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 92. 42. Cf. Ephesians 4:14. 43. Luke 14:26. 44. Genesis 22:1b–11. 45. UDVS, 128. 46. FSE, 31. 47. Genesis 22. 48. FSE, 44. 49. JP, 1:731. But might Kierkegaard agree that it is also to have one’s heaven “here on earth” too? Probably. “What is joy? or what is it to be joyful? It is to be present to oneself; but to be truly present to oneself is this thing of ‘today,’ that is, this thing of being today, of truly being today” (WA, 39). In addition to being the author of texts with such depressing titles as Concept of Anxiety, Sickness Unto Death, and Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard was also the author of much more edifying titles as well, for instance, Works of Love, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, and even The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, from which the quotation above is drawn. For Kierkegaard as for Solomon, “[i]t is good to grasp the one and not let go of the other” (Ecclesiastes 7:18). In any case, I take it that the “hell” is that it requires what is sometimes no less worse than physical suffering, namely, the constant and incessant questioning by one’s own conscience as to whether one is “living in such a way that you are conscious of being a single individual” (UDVS 127) and whom “eternity takes hold of . . . with the strong arms of conscience, encircling him” (UDVS 128). 50. FT, 70. 51. Cf. Sartre’s story about the young man who attempts to avoid making a decision by consulting a priest. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism,” in Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Citadel Press, 1985), 27. 52. E. E. Cummings, “Since Feeling Is First,” in 100 Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 1954).

3 The Problem of the Incarnation

R

eligious plurality is a historical matter of fact. There are lots of unique and different religions in the world and they do not all teach the same things. Religious pluralism, on the other hand, is a philosophical thesis about religious plurality, namely, the view that no one religion should be regarded as uniquely more true and good than all of the other religions. But if the thesis of religious pluralism is correct, then it would seem that some of the most fundamental teachings of nearly all of the major historical religions are untenable. It cannot, for example, be literally and objectively true that the Koran is the perfect and final word of God and also the Bible is infallible. Nor could it be the case both that the central Advaita Vedanta doctrine, which says that Brahman is Atman and only the self (atman) is real, and the central Theravada doctrine of anatman, which says that there is no self, equally and fully express the most supreme and important truth about reality. Accordingly, if the philosophical thesis of religious pluralism is correct, then any viable solution to this problem of conflicting truth-claims, including that solution that was proposed in chapter 1, necessarily entails that at least some of the core tenets of major world religions are, objectively speaking, not absolutely true. The apparent consequence of religious pluralism is thus that it “destroys each religion in attempt to save them all,”1 leaving a nagging question about whether someone can consistently and coherently accept the thesis of religious pluralism and at the same time meaningfully embrace and appropriate the particular doctrines of their own specific religion. One particular instance of this general problem for religious pluralism, a formulation aimed specifically at the compatibility of pluralism and Chris— 45 —

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tianity, is the so-called “problem of the incarnation.” Hick formulates this objection to pluralism as follows: The traditional Christian understanding of Jesus of Nazareth is that he was God incarnate, who became a man to die for the sins of the world and who founded the church to proclaim this. If he was indeed God incarnate, Christianity is the only religion founded by God in person, and must as such be uniquely superior to all other religions.2

Accordingly, the objection goes, one cannot be both a believer in the incarnation and a religious pluralist. Either she must affirm the doctrine of the incarnation, in which case she cannot coherently maintain pluralism, or she must fail to affirm the doctrine of the incarnation, in which case she cannot meaningfully be regarded as Christian. In refutation of the problem of the incarnation as an objection to pluralism, I argue that we find resources in Kierkegaard for a response that is intellectually tenable and, in comparison to certain contemporary solutions to the problem such as that of Hick himself, more potentially satisfying from a spiritual and theological perspective as well. This is the task of the present chapter. Some Proposed Replies to the Problem and Their Shortcomings One potential means of replying to the problem of the incarnation would be to reiterate, in good Kierkegaardian fashion and in line with the conclusion of chapter 1, that Christianity is not a doctrine, and thus there is no need to affirm the truth of the incarnation. But the promise of such a response is severely limited. First, it begs the question. The objection before us is precisely that the affirmation of the truth of the incarnation is so central to Christianity that it is positively meaningless for anyone who would fail to affirm the incarnation to be regarded as Christian. Accordingly, that Christianity is not a doctrine cannot be straightforwardly asserted as premise in response to the problem of the incarnation since the very question at issue is whether a Christian who abandons Christianity’s central doctrines can meaningfully be regarded as essentially Christian. Second, a simple rejection of the truth of the incarnation not only cannot be meaningfully regarded as Christian, it also cannot meaningfully be regarded as Kierkegaardian. And since the task before us is to find resources for a response to the problem in Kierkegaard, it will first of all have to be admitted that, despite all of the protest against understanding Christianity in terms of its doctrinal content, Kierkegaard nevertheless places a very high priority on the incarnation. Climacus, for example, speaks often of the “the absurd”



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and “absolute paradox,” which he also identifies as the eternal God incarnate in time. “The object of faith,” Climacus tells us, “is the actuality of the god in existence, that is, as a particular individual, that is, that the god has existed as an individual human being.”3 Accordingly, any meaningfully Kierkegaardian response to the problem of the incarnation will necessarily and happily concede the truth of the incarnation as its starting point. A second possible means of reply to the problem of the incarnation is to maneuver out of the problem by reinterpreting the doctrine of the incarnation as the expression of an “eternal truth,” saying, for example, that the incarnation is a picture of the divine potential in humanity. According to this interpretation, which is classically represented by Hegel, the incarnation is not literally true, but provides an important and timeless symbol of the immanence of the divine nature.4 Insofar as the Hegelian approach to the doctrine of the incarnation represents a possible response to the problem for religious pluralism, the approach shows promise. But insofar as Hegel’s Christology claims to preserve the content of Christianity while merely shedding its historical skin, its potential wanes and, at any rate, Kierkegaard finds it deplorable and vehemently rails against it. C. Stephen Evans sums up the Kierkegaard’s objection as follows: As Kierkegaard sees things, the Hegelian account cannot be right. For even if we take the incarnation merely as a fictional story, the meaning of the story cannot be that we humans have godlike potential, and that ultimately each of us has the divine within. Rather, the point of the story is that we humans lack the truth, and that we need a divine Teacher who not only brings us the truth, but transforms us into the kinds of beings who are capable of receiving the truth. In effect, he accuses the Hegelians of being bad readers of the story.5

“Christianity,” accordingly, “is not a doctrine about the unity of the divine and the human.”6 To regard the incarnation as a symbol of mankind’s innate divinity is a gross misinterpretation of the Gospel story, and more than that, a self-flattering blasphemy.7 Other so-called “degree Christologies,”8 such as that put forward by Hick himself as the solution to the problem of the incarnation, run into the same sort of error that Kierkegaard perceives in the Hegelian account. Following in the tradition of low Christology, Hick starts with the wholly and purely human Jesus of the historical past and ends with an explicit critique of the Nicene and Caledonian formulae as deeply mistaken. Jesus was not the “God-man,” Hick argues, but merely human. Even if he was quite extraordinary, the historical Jesus was by no means God, nor did he claim to be God. The historical Jesus was an upright and remarkable teacher and servant-leader who fully exemplified a saintly and spiritually rich life to an

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especially rare degree. But, strictly speaking, says Hick, there was nothing in him that cannot be found also in other great moral and spiritual teachers. Yet, despite the blatant denial of a God-man in human history, Hick does not let go of the idea of incarnation entirely. Rather, incarnation is seen as a metaphor, the meaning of which is that all humans have the potential to become “divine.” This element of Hick’s Christology is deeply Hegelian. “Incarnation becomes a matter of degree,” says Hick. “God is incarnate in all men insofar as they are Spirit-filled, or Christ-like, or truly saintly.”9 Accordingly, “Incarnation in this sense has occurred and is occurring in many different ways and degrees in many different persons.”10 If Hegel’s Christology falls prey to the charge of self-flattering blasphemy, then so too does that of Hick. The presupposition of both is that the “truth” is hidden Socratically within humankind, and that human beings thereby have the resources and potential within themselves to become, like Jesus himself, “sons of God.” One problem here is Hick’s underestimation of the role of radical human finitude and sin in his Christology. The flip-side of this is the lack of any role for Christ as savior, atoner, redeemer, and judge.11 In either case, Hick’s Christology is radically divorced from any doctrine of soteriology. Not only is an encounter with Christ unnecessary for salvation—as Hick thinks it must be due to his commitment to religious pluralism—but Hick’s position also implies that those who do claim salvation as a result of an encounter with Christ would seem to be deeply deluded. There is no role for a living, cosmic Christ in Hick’s Christology. There is but the dead man Jesus of Nazareth, whom we can and ought to imitate and admire, but with whom we can have no real “personal relationship” today. It is quite understandable then that Hick’s Christology is found to be deeply spiritually unsatisfying from a Christian perspective. Friends and foes of Hick’s philosophy of religious pluralism alike have made the point forcefully. For example, Anglican priest and theologian Andrew Shanks, who is otherwise by and large sympathetic with Hick’s project, criticizes Hick for producing “a theology whose whole emphasis tends to be on the negation of exclusivist truth-claims, and nothing else.” “This is especially the case,” says Shanks, “when . . . [Hick] comes to tackle the dogma of the Incarnation. In effect, he sets out to combat the historic ideologization of the dogma by entirely removing its excitement, pouring cold buckets of water on it. It as though he has just one main thing to say: that the Incarnation, like the central teachings of other faith-traditions, is after all ‘only’ a metaphor.”12 Similarly, Paul Knitter, summing up the concerns of Hick’s critics, questions whether Hick’s view can be called meaningfully Christian. Not only does Hick’s view constitute a radical break with the entire post-Nicene Chris-



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tian tradition, but it is also unclear whether Hick’s Christology can sustain modern Christian spirituality: “what Christians feel in their hearts about Jesus,” says Knitter, “is not just that he is truly God’s revelation but that he is truly God’s decisive and definitive voice in their lives.”13 It is very difficult to see how Hick’s vision of a merely human Jesus can play such a role for Christian believers. Concurring with this judgment, conservative and Evangelical scholar Douglas McCready argues that Hick, by “espous[ing] the basic error of liberal Christology,” thereby “considers the importance of Christ to lie in his teaching rather than his work.” That is, by focusing exclusively on the teaching and example of a merely human Jesus, Hick misses the very essence of all Christology, which is the role played by Christ not just as teacher and example, but as Lord and Savior. “[I]f Christ really is our Savior,” argues McCready, “this is the result of his work, not his words.”14 Kierkegaard, it seems, would concur. “The object of faith [is] not the teaching but the teacher,”15 Climacus says in Fragments. A Kierkegaardian Reply to the Problem Avoiding now the sort of misguided approaches to the problem of the incarnation advanced by pseudo-Kierkegaardians, Hegelians, and Hickeans, how might a modern-day Kierkegaardian handle the problem of the incarnation for religious pluralism? First, it is indisputable that, for Kierkegaard, the story of the incarnation ought to be read in terms of “the unity of God and an individual human being,”16 that is, a single human being, namely Jesus of Nazareth. It is also clear that the story of the incarnation is not merely a story, and that the incarnation is somehow historical for Kierkegaard. On this point, I am in basic agreement with Evans: “Any attempt to substitute for the historical incarnation a ‘myth’ or ‘story’ or ‘symbol’ whose factual truth is unimportant inevitably transforms Christianity into a ‘Socratic’ view that assumes that our religious consciousness does possess the Truth.”17 Contra Evans, however, I also wish to suggest that Kierkegaard’s emphasis on a historical incarnation does not conflict with a robust thesis of religious pluralism, and accordingly, that Kierkegaard provides us with a suitable response to the problem of the incarnation, a solution that at once acknowledges and accepts the premise of pluralism and yet also avoid the pitfalls of the Hegelian and Hickean Christologies. How can this be? First, faith in the “factual truth” that God came into existence does involve something like an affirmation of the traditional incarnation doctrine. However, Climacus is clear that this is no “simple historical fact,” such as the fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon or the fact that George Washington was the first President of the United States. And though the incarnation is not, as

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Hegel would have it, an “eternal fact” such as the truths of mathematics and general metaphysics are supposed to be, it is what Climacus calls an “absolute fact,” which is “historical” in an altogether different sense.18 I believe that if we understand Climacus correctly here, then we can avoid the problem of the incarnation as proposed above by Hick, but without falling prey to the spiritually empty solution proposed by Hick. For Climacus, the categories of “simple historical fact” and “eternal truth” both fall under the heading of objectivity. These are familiar notions and do not require any special analysis. Climacus’s designation of the incarnation as an “absolute fact,” however, does require explanation. An absolute fact is not simply historical, in the sense of an objective, datable event of the past. And neither is it simply eternal, in the sense of something completely ahistorical and knowable only by a priori intuition. Rather, an absolute fact is one that is eternal and historical, not as an objective happening, but rather as a subjective reality. It is a fact that has both eternal significance, and therefore cannot be simply historical since the historical is always only approximation,19 and yet “the historical cannot be removed, either, for then we have only an eternal fact.”20 I want to suggest that the key to making full sense of this notion of the incarnation as an absolute fact depends on a distinction between two orders of the historical. On the one hand, history is something that happens objectively. This aspect of the historical is memorably illustrated in the saying often attributed to Henry Ford that “history is just one damn thing after another.” In this sense, the historical is what theologian Rudolf Bultmann, following his predecessor Martin Kähler, calls historisch. There is, however, a second meaning of the historical, namely the existential-historical or geschichtlich.21 Something is a geschichtlich event only insofar as it comes to have decisive significance for human existence. A past historisch event can also become an existential geschichtlich event for me. But the decisive thing is that it comes to have meaning, here and now, in the context of my history, and so need not to have occurred in an objectively datable historie. Bultmann’s distinction between historisch and geschichtlich quite obviously parallels Kierkegaard’s own distinction between objectivity and subjectivity. It also parallels the distinction that Anti-Climacus draws in Practice in Christianity between history simplicter on the one hand, and “actuality” and “sacred history” on the other. “History,” says Anti-Climacus, is “what actually happened” or, quite simply, “the past.”22 But history is not the actual. “The qualification that is lacking—which is the qualification of truth (as inwardness) and of all righteousness is—for you. The past is not actuality—for me. Only the contemporary is actuality for me. That which you are living simultaneously is actuality—for you.”23 Likewise, sacred history, “which relates the



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story of [Christ’s] life in the state of his abasement, and also that he claimed to be God” has “nothing at all” to do with history in general. Sacred history is “qualitatively different from history in general.”24 By making a distinction between the simply historical on the one hand, and a second-order historical that is absolute precisely because it cannot be “apportioned essentially by time,”25 Kierkegaard and Bultmann provide a way of understanding the incarnation as historical without requiring an affirmation of the incarnation as a datable event of the past. Bultmann is explicit about this: “For the incarnation is likewise an eschatological event and not a datable event of the past; it is an event which is continually being re-enacted in the event of the proclamation.”26 In this way, Bultmann concludes elsewhere, “Christ is everything that is asserted of him in so far as he is the Eschatological Event. But he is not this in such a way that it would be expressible in terms of a world event. . . . Rather he is such—indeed, to put it more exactly, he becomes such—in the encounter” with the Word, that is, the revelation of sin and the proclamation of grace.27 Bultmann’s understanding here provides a coherent way for us to make sense of Anti-Climacus’s claim that Christ belongs to sacred history rather than world-history, as well as the fact that God-in-time is the “object of faith,” namely, because the believer, in the words of Climacus, “makes it historical for himself.”28 It also helps us understand Climacus’s characterization of “the moment” of revelation that takes place with the life of an individual as “the fullness of time,”29 a phrase that alludes to the incarnation: “But when the fullness of time had come,” says the author of the Epistle to Galatians, “God sent his Son.”30 Finally, it helps us reconcile the tension between Kierkegaard’s vehement dismissal of historical evidence with the high priority he places on the event of the incarnation. If the incarnation is only, or even primarily, a geschichtlich event, and not a past event, then there is no mystery as to why Anti-Climacus would regard it “strange” that “history is the very thing that people have wanted to use to demonstrate that Christ was God.”31 But if primary importance should be placed on belief in the incarnation as a worldhistorical happening of time past, then we are left perplexed as to why Kierkegaard should not regard it as vitally important that objections to a historisch incarnation do not go unchallenged. Does any of this mean that, as one commentator has bluntly framed the matter, “the incarnation is a superfluous detail” for Kierkegaard? 32 Might we boldly answer, yes, as a “simple historical fact” the incarnation is a superfluous detail. However, with respect to the incarnation as an “absolute fact,” a subjective reality encountered here and now, a resounding “no” must be given. Even as the historisch events of world-history are irrelevant for the life of faith, the Eschatological Event, which is my actual encounter with God-

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in-time here and now, wherein sin and grace are revealed, is by no means dispensable for Christian faith. In this sense a historical (geschichtlich) incarnation is the only necessary “detail” for Kierkegaard. Accordingly, a Kierkegaardian response to the problem of the incarnation is able to avoid the problems of Hegelian and Hickean solutions. The Kierkegaardian insistence upon the importance of encountering the God-intime here and now, in the “moment,” guards against the self-flattery objection insofar as the impetus for this insistence is precisely that human beings are so far removed from Godlike status that, if they are to be saved, it must be God himself who becomes real in time to redeem them. Likewise, the Kierkegaardian solution, unlike the Hickean solution, is spiritually satisfying due to its recognition and affirmation of the validity of faith in Christ as the God-man and Savior rather a mere human example to be imitated and admired. Finally, if Shanks is right to liken Hick’s approach to Christology to dumping cold buckets of water on the passion of faith, certainly the same cannot be said of the Kierkegaardian approach. The incarnation—along with the crucifixion, the resurrection, the atonement, and other central categories of the Christian faith—are not mere metaphors, but existential, geschichtlich realities that I experience here and now.33 Once the incarnation is understood as a geschichtlich event rather than as a world-historical, cosmic reality, we see that the problem of the incarnation does not constitute an effective objection against pluralism. It is only when the founder of Christianity, the human being Jesus of Nazareth, is cognitively believed to be the unique historisch incarnation of God himself that Christianity must thereby come to regard itself as the superior religion on the basis of its divine founding. But since this is but a “superfluous detail” of Christian faith, the objection fails. Notes   1. John DePoe, “The Significance of Religious Disagreement,” in Taking Christian Moral Thought Seriously: The Legitimacy of Religious Beliefs in the Marketplace of Ideas, ed. Jeremy A. Evans (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2011), 59.   2. John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), ix.  3. CUP, 326.   4. Consider, for example, the following: “Man knows God only insofar as God Himself knows Himself in Man.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), III.303. Or as we find Hegel’s view expressed by one of his theological successors: “Humanity is the union of the two natures—God become



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man.” David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot (New York: Macmillan, 1892), 780. For a useful discussion of Hegel on the incarnation as well as Strauss’s understanding in relation to Hegel’s view, see Daniel P. Jamros, “Hegel on the Incarnation: Unique or Universal?,” Theological Studies 56, no. 2 (1995).   5. C. Stephen Evans, “Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker,” in Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 13. See also “Misusing Religious Language: Something About Kierkegaard and the Myth of God Incarnate,” in Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006).  6. CUP, 326.  7. PC, 81–82, 87–88 on the “union of God and man” as an “optical illusion” and the veneration of the “established order as the divine” as an “acoustical illusion.”   8. A degree Christology is one that says that Christ is not different from other human beings in kind, but only in degree. Hick himself seems to prefer the term “inspiration Christology.”   9. John Hick, “Letter to the Editors: Incarnation,” Theology 80 (1977): 205. 10. Disputed Questions in Theology and the Philosophy of Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 97. 11. What Douglas McCready says here of Schleiermacher can also be said of Hick: “Recommending belief in inspiration instead of incarnation he presented Jesus as a God-filled man, not the God-man. This Jesus, who differed from us only in having been a better person than we are, can be an example for us to follow. But he cannot be our Savior.” Douglas McCready, “‘He Came Down from Heaven’: The Preexistence of Christ Revisited,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40, no. 3 (1997): 422. Hick, for his part, seems to be aware of the problem and thus devotes the entire eleventh chapter of The Metaphor of God Incarnate to abolishing the very notion of Christ the atoner. 12. Andrew Shanks, God and Modernity: A New and Better Way to Do Theology (New York: Routledge, 2000), 46. 13. Paul F. Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 166–67. 14. McCready, “‘He Came Down from Heaven’: The Preexistence of Christ Revisited,” 428. 15. PF, 62. 16. PC, 82. 17. Evans, “Misusing Religious Language: Something About Kierkegaard and the Myth of God Incarnate,” 155. 18. PF, 99–100. 19. CUP, 21–46. For discussion of the approximation argument, see chapter 1 of the present work. 20. PF, 100. 21. Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” in Kerygma and Myth, ed. Hans Warner Bartsch (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 37–38. It should be noted that Bultmann’s distinction is a modification of Kähler’s distinction, not a

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direct parallel. For the latter, see Martin Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, trans. Carl E. Braaten (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964). 22. PC, 63–64. 23. Ibid., 64. 24. Ibid., 30. 25. PF, 99. 26. Rudolf Bultmann, “Bultmann Replies to His Critics,” in Kerygma and Myth, edited by Hans Warner Bartsch (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 209n. Eschatology literally means “study of the last things.” In traditional theology, the doctrine of eschatology deals with the end of the world. Similarly, in Bultmann’s theology, eschatology is that salvation that ends everything earthly. However, Bultmann understands this metaphorically and existentially to mean that an eschatological event is an event that causes a rift in the ordinary course of existence, thereby resulting in a radically new existential self-understanding. The encounter with the proclamation (kerygma) of the grace of Jesus Christ here and now is the paradigmatic Eschatological Event insofar as it is the means by which the “old man” is put to death and the Christian is reborn as a new creation. 27. “The Christological Confession of the World Council of Churches,” in Essays: Philosophical and Theological (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 286. “God, who stands aloof from the history of nations, meets each man in his own little history,” Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel, 2 vols. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 1:25. 28. PF, 88. 29. Ibid., 18. 30. Galatians 4:4. 31. PC, 30. 32. Michael P. Levine, “Why the Incarnation Is a Superfluous Detail for Kierkegaard,” Religious Studies 18 (1982). 33. This understanding of the incarnation also sheds light on what Kierkegaard means when he says that Christianity is not a doctrine. Wittgenstein’s comments on this are illuminating in this connection as well: “Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean a theory about what has happened and will happened to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980), 28e. In our case, the Christian is one who affirms the truth of the incarnation, not in the sense of belief in a doctrine or cognitive assent to a creed, but in the sense of one who is “just as contemporary with Christ’s presence as his contemporaries were” (PC, 9).

PART II INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUES

4 The Problem of Sin

A

ccording to Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the highest modality of faith, religiousness B, is a “decisively Christian”1 phenomenon. The characteristic feature of this sphere of religiousness B, that which separates it from the lower form of universally religious religiousness A, is the problematic of the consciousness of sin and the forgiveness of sin. However, according to the thesis of the present chapter, the problem of sin is not uniquely Christian and, along with the distinction between religiousness A and B, finds striking parallel in the thirteenth-century Japanese monk Shinran Shōnin’s Jōdo Shinshū school of Pure Land Buddhism. Religiousness B in the Postscript

First, then, what is religiousness B? What is religiousness A? And what is their relationship? The sphere of religiousness A is what Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments and its Concluding Unscientific Postscript, calls “immanence.”2 Religiousness A is the existential attitude of inward deepening, Socratic self-knowledge, and selfeffort.3 It is characterized by three movements: resignation, suffering, and guilt-consciousness. First, by means of rigorous religious praxis and ethical earnestness the practitioner of religiousness A undertakes the fundamentally important task of resignation: “simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute telos and relatively to relative ends.”4 Climacus provides the reader with a — 57 —

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kind of negative test: inspect all of the ends and purposes to which you commit yourself—the pursuit of pleasure, economic pursuits, family life, ethical obligations, ecclesiastical duties, everything—and then, if there is anything there that you find yourself unable to give up for the sake of eternal happiness, then you can be assured that you are not relating to eternal happiness.5 In other words, resignation demands renunciation of every external devotion and no mediation or relativization of this requirement can be tolerated.6 The second movement of religiousness A—the natural outcome of resignation—is suffering. It is positively painful to give up the attachments that stand in the way of an absolute relation to the absolute telos. Climacus calls this difficult and arduous task of surrendering attachment to the relativities of life “dying to immediacy.”7 The third and final movement of religiousness A is guilt-consciousness. Given the impossibly high ideality implicit in the tasks of resignation and suffering, the real existing individual is, for all practical purposes, bound for failure: In abstracto and on paper, it goes more easily. There one sets forth the task, [one] has the individual be an abstract something that in every way is “at your service” just as soon as the task is set forth—and then one is finished. In existence, the individual is a concretion, time is concrete. . . . Even at the moment the task is assigned, something is already wasted because there is an “in the meantime” and the beginning is not properly made.8

While it might “in theory” be possible for an individual to avoid the guilt incurred from the failure to achieve the task of relating absolutely to the absolute, the reality on the ground is that human beings are always already guilty even before they get started. The problem is that human beings are not neutral agents. Prior to any consideration of an absolute commitment to the absolute, human beings suffer from the propensity to absolutize the relative. Climacus is pointing us here to that same truth of which a penitent King David speaks when he confesses, “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”9 It would be difficult enough to fulfill the tasks of resignation and suffering if one were to start fresh, with a clean slate, but such is not possible for an existing human being. From the moment of birth human beings are shaped and formed by the world and its iniquities, making it nearly impossible for the poor existing individual to begin the task, let alone complete it. What hope is there then? It is precisely here, where the individual has suffered through the various moments of religiousness A, that the first glimmer of the specifically Christian grace and hope of religiousness B is given. If the emphasis of religiousness A is that “subjectivity, inwardness, is truth,” then



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the new principle of religiousness B is that “subjectivity is untruth.”10 Yet this new principle should not be taken to mean that one goes beyond subjectivity by means of claiming truth for objectivity. Subjectivity is untruth does not mean that objectivity is truth. Rather, the point is that the movements of resignation and suffering made on one’s own strength are bound for guilt and failure, and thus subjectivity—that is, subjectivity in the sense of self-effort through inward deepening—is insufficient for attaining an appropriate relation to eternal truth. This new principle that “subjectivity is untruth” is the breaking point between religiousness A and religiousness B. Whereas religiousness A operates “within immanence,”11 religiousness B is born out of a “break with immanence.”12 The former assumes that attainment of truth is achieved through inward deepening, and thus, that the individual has the resources within him or herself to be able to relate to eternal happiness. In the sphere of religiousness B, on the other hand, the attention of the believer is directed to the insufficiency of inward deepening and the dangers of self-reliance. In religiousness B, guilt-consciousness is displaced by a more acute consciousness of sin. Merold Westphal describes the qualitative difference as follows: Immanence prevailed in the Garden of Eden, where it was possible for Adam and Eve to meet God face-to-face. The metaphysics of presence was not a theory but a daily experience. As the embodiment of Religiousness A, Socrates is the realization of paradise lost. It is no longer possible to meet God face-to-face, but hidden in the trees and underbrush God is never very far away. . . . The garden is not quite what it used to be (guilt consciousness), but at least I am still there (immanence). Religiousness B is existence east of Eden. Its decisive break with immanence is the realization of having been expelled from the garden, separated from the place of presence by a flaming sword.13

Given the break with immanence, the solution to the problem of sin cannot be achieved by the self-effort of religiousness A. The resources for reconciliation cannot be found within. Rather, the only solution is that the individual’s self-identity is altogether replaced as she is “born again” as a “new creation.”14 But how does this “rebirth”15 come about? From whence does this grace come? For Climacus, it can only come by means of “decisively Christian”16 faith. To be a Christian is to be born again through a personal encounter with God in time, Jesus Christ. Non-Christian religion, while not completely useless so long as it is guided by the passionate inwardness of religiousness A, falls short insofar as it lacks the “paradoxical-religious” and “existencecontradiction” of religiousness B.

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The paradox is the encounter with God in Christ in time. The accompanying contradiction is what Anti-Climacus, author of Practice in Christianity, calls “the offense,” which is, at the same moment, the consciousness of sin and the consciousness of forgiveness. The offense is, in the first order, a result of the implication of the offer of forgiveness, namely, the suggestion that individual human beings are so beyond repair that the only hope for them to overcome despair is for God himself to meet them in time. Second, it is offense at the notion that we should actually imitate and enact a repetition of this forgiveness in our own lives.17 Religiousness B in Pure Land Buddhism When the early Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier first arrived in Japan and encountered Pure Land Buddhism, he actually expressed disappointment and took his own Catholic Church to be behind the ball for not becoming established in Japan sooner, namely, because he thought the Lutherans had beat him to the punch.18 Others have suggested that the early Christian missionaries saw something in Pure Land that so closely resembled Christianity they labeled it “the devil’s Christianity,” that is, because it must have been a counterfeit arranged by Satan, designed to lead astray toward the name of Amida those whose hearts would otherwise turn to the name of Christ.19 For Karl Barth, accordingly, the only difference between Christianity and Pure Land Buddhism is the name Jesus Christ.20 The central experience of Pure Land Buddhism is referred to as shinjin in Japanese, which literally means “faith-mind,” but is more often translated as “true entrusting.” Shinjin, one commentator informs us, is “a personal relationship with Amida Buddha (a total reliance on another) as well as a radical reconstitution of one’s fundamental attitude toward the world.”21 The formal parallels to decisively Christian faith in this definition of Pure Land shinjin could perhaps be merely superficial. After all, even within Christendom there are many who can parrot without proper understanding the formula that to be a Christian is to be born again through a personal relationship with Christ. Moreover, there is one glaring and obvious difference. Where the Christian formula refers to Christ, the Pure Land formula refers to Amida Buddha. Yet, as faith is not a doctrine, this should not concern us, since, in Kierkegaard’s own words, as long as “the how of this relation is in the truth, the individual is in truth.”22 This is what concerns us here. The decisive question then, is just how deep the similarities run between the how of Kierkegaard’s “decisively Christian” religiousness B and the how of Pure Land shinjin.



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Taken especially in its Jōdo Shinshū variety, Pure Land Buddhism places great emphasis on the realization of shinjin. Even before the time of Shinran, however, the hallmark of Pure Land Buddhism had always been emphasis on the “easy path” of devotion to Amida over against the “difficult path” of traditional Buddhism. This emphasis finds its roots in the Land of Bliss Sutras of Mahayana Buddhism. The foundational narrative of these sutras tells the story of Dharmakara, the Bodhisattva (or aspirant Buddha) who would later become Amida, the Buddha of Immeasurable Light. According to the Larger Land of Bliss Sutra, Dharmakara, who was a king in a remote period of time, was inspired by the teaching of the Buddha of that time, a Buddha named Lokesvaraja Buddha, to renounce his kingdom and become a monk. After seeing infinite Buddha-realms shown to him by Lokesvaraja Buddha, Dharmakara determined to build his own Buddha-realm, namely, the Pure Land of the West, which was to excel all other Buddharealms. This land would be open to all sentient beings who vow to be reborn there, and would enable the ones reborn there the best conditions under which to attain Buddhahood for themselves. In his strong determination to achieve the universal salvation of living beings, Dharmakara made forty-eight vows. The eighteenth of these vows forms the basis for the Pure Land way of shinjin. This so-called “primal vow” reads as follows: If, when I attain Buddhahood, the sentient beings of the ten quarters, with sincere mind entrusting themselves, aspiring to be born in my land, and saying my Name perhaps even ten times, should not be born there, may I not attain the supreme enlightenment.23

The Pure Land school teaches that all living beings who have faith in Amida Buddha and whole-heartedly recite his name with a pure mind will be reborn into the Western Pure Land after this life, not on the basis of their own self-power (jiriki)—that is impossible given the “ignorance, egocentricity, and delusional perceptions”24 of finite and sinful human beings—but on the basis of the other-power (tariki) of Amida. As developed by Hōnen and, especially, his disciple Shinran Shōnin, faith in the other-power of Amida not only assures entrance into Pure Land, but transforms individuals in this present world. Since Amida Buddha is the source of light and compassion in this life, we can make this world a “Pure Land” by our compassionate actions based on shinjin in Amida and his grace in our lives. Shinjin, according to Shinran, is not primarily a doctrine about future worlds, or at least it is not only that, but, to use the language of Kierke­ gaard, shinjin is an existence-communication here and now. This thought can be put into traditional Mahayana language by saying that the doctrine about rebirth in Amida’s Pure Land of the West is an expedient means (upaya), that,

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independently of the question of its literal truth, facilitates a rebirth here and now. Shinran refers to this present fulfillment of the primal vow as “immediate attainment of birth.”25 This notion of immediate attainment of birth is comparable to Kierke­ gaard’s appropriation of the Pauline notion of the “fullness of time,” which Kierkegaard takes to be the moment of rebirth in which God himself meets the individual in time and bestows a new identity and in which the individual responds with a leap of faith.26 In fact, these notions of the rebirth (ōjō), the leap (ōchō), and the moment (ichinen) all play a decisive role in Shinran’s thought, and that role is remarkably similar in each case to the way these notions are conceived in Kierkegaard. Rebirth is the fundamental transformation of the believer here and now. The leap is the moment of abrupt transference from the path of self-effort, religiousness A, into the grace of Amida/ Christ, religiousness B.27 Note well, however, that immediate attainment of birth does not mean that one attains perfect enlightenment here and now. As with Kierkegaard, Shinran’s depth of vision regarding the radical evil of human beings cuts deep. Although one is “saved” immediately and becomes “[t]ransformed into the mind of great compassion” and “one in taste with the sea of wisdom”28 in the awakening to shinjin here and now in this moment, this does not mean that the moral perfection of one’s compassion is thereby achieved automatically. When one is reborn in and through the other-power of Amida, there is a real rebirth, a fundamental change in the orientation of one’s heart and mind. Everything is seen anew. Even one’s very conceptions of moral goodness and moral evil become so radically altered that one sees even his or her past selfefforts to perform “righteous deeds . . . like a filthy cloth” to use the Hebrew prophet’s imagery.29 Yet even with this transformation, perfect enlightenment is not complete. Even after salvation by the grace of Amida, the still imperfect devotee continues to grow in wisdom and compassion, not as means of attaining enlightenment, but within the context of a personal relationship with Amida and with a heart of gratitude in response to Amida’s grace. Notice that the similarity between Kierkegaard and Shinran here is a similarity in content, not merely a similarity in form. The new life received in and through the personal encounter with Amida Buddha and the new life obtained via the personal relationship with Jesus Christ is in both cases a reorientation of the self toward loving compassion. Just as the primus motor of the Christian faith is love, Pure Land shinjin gives rise to a life of boundless compassion (muen no jihi). Like Kierkegaard, who juxtaposes the preferential loves of romance and friendship with the distinctly Christian commanded neighbor love, which is regarded as a sort of divinely bestowed supernatural



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gift, Pure Land Buddhists strive to exhibit an unconditional compassion that transcends all varieties of ordinary selfish thinking.30 The complex relationship between self-power and other-power in Pure Land Buddhism is also paralleled in Kierkegaard, namely, in the distinction between religiousness A and religiousness B. This similarity has not been lost on the Japanese thinkers of the Kyoto school. Twentieth-century Pure Land philosopher Tanabe Hajime, for example, explicitly acknowledges many times over that his philosophy of “metanoesis,” which he defines as “the activity of conversion and transformation performed by other-power,”31 bears a strong resemblance to the religious philosophy of Kierkegaard.32 There is also a resemblance with respect to Tanabe’s pupil, Takeuchi Yoshinori,33 who describes Pure Land experience in terms of three stages of religious consciousness. Takeuchi says that the first stage, which can be characterized in terms of reliance upon self-power, is “aesthetic and ethical.”34 As an “ardent longing for salvation” by means of an “introverted and centered consciousness”35 it parallels the how of the first two movements of Kierkegaard’s religiousness A, resignation and suffering. The second stage, which parallels Kierkegaard’s notion of guilt-consciousness, is transitional. At this second stage, by means of “confessing one’s own finiteness and sinfulness,”36 the religious seeker comes to glimpse the grace of Amida for the first time. However, in the attempt to repent oneself into the light of the grace of Amida, the religious seeker has not yet realized the depth of her own egocentricity, and likewise, has not recognized the need for fundamental and radical rebirth. No amount of self-humiliation can amount to saving grace. The gift of the Pure Land must be granted. This gift is finally given at the third stage of the religious, where genuine other-power is encountered in a deep and genuine encounter with a grace that transcends all of our maneuvering. This final stage corresponds to the sphere of transcendence, religiousness B. But even as this transcendence remains outside of the active grasp of the seeker, Takeuchi argues that the encounter with grace is “not like a car bumping into a careless pedestrian on the street,”37 by which he means to imply that the transcendent other-power is not arrived at accidentally, but only after a purposeful, self-driven “trans-descending” on the part of the seeker. Again, this is comparable to the relationship between religiousness A and B in Kierkegaard. Even as religiousness B marks a fundamental breach with A, “Religiousness A must first be present in the individual before there can be any consideration of becoming aware of the dialectical B.”38 Clearly, the similarities in the how of Pure Land Buddhism and the how of religiousness B are not merely superficial. Of course, it has not been demonstrated here that Christianity and Shin Buddhism are ultimately the same path. Obviously each is unique in a number of ways. But what this similarity

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does suggest is that Kierkegaard’s dismissal of non-Christian religion on the basis that all non-Christian religions can at best communicate some form of the lower religiousness A is much too quick.39 Notes  1. CUP, 557.   2. Ibid., 572.   3. Climacus’ distinction between religiousness A and B in the Postscript directly correlates with his proposal of two the hypotheses, also labeled A and B, in the “thought-project” (9–12) of Philosophical Fragments. In both cases, A is associated with Socratic conception of all-knowledge as self-knowledge, that is, that the truth is already present within and needs only to be recollected. See, for example, Plato, Meno, in The Complete Works of Plato, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 81c–d.   4. Ibid., 431.   5. Ibid., 393–94.   6. Ibid., 395–96.   7. Ibid., 461.   8. Ibid., 526.   9. Psalm 51:5. 10. CUP, 207. 11. Ibid., 570. 12. Ibid., 571. 13. Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette: Purdue University, 1996), 186–87. 14. CUP, 576. 15. PF, 18–19. 16. CUP, 557. 17. PC, 171, 237. See also WL on the “redoubling” of love (280) and the “Christian like for like” (376). 18. Paul S. Chung, Constructing Irregular Theology: Bamboo and Minjung in East Asian Perspective (Leiden, Netherlands: BRILL, 2009), 34. 19. Stephen Turnbull, Japanese Fortified Temples and Monasteries AD 710–1062 (New York: Osprey Publishing, 2012), 47; Philipp Karl Eidmann, “Is Shin Budd­hism the Same as Christianity?,” retrieved from http://www.seattlebetsuin.com/Is_Shin_ Buddhism_the_same_as_Christianity.htm. 20. Barth’s point, however, is not to show that the difference is insignificant. His point is rather based on the backward fideistic reasoning that since Pure Land Buddhism in essence offers everything that can be found in Christianity, it must be that the name of Jesus Christ that most decisively defines Christianity. “The ChristianProtestant religion of grace is not the true religion because it is a religion of grace” or any other feature. If that were the case, Barth admits, then other religions, such as



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Pure Land, would be equally as good. Rather, then, “the truth of the Christian religion is in fact enclosed in the one name of Jesus Christ, and nothing else.” Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: Volume 1, Part 2: The Doctrine of the Word of God (New York: T & T Clark, 1956), 343. 21. William Lad Sessions, The Concept of Faith: A Philosophical Investigation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 231. 22. CUP, 199. 23. Quoted in Yoshifumi Ueda and Dennis Hirota, Shinran: An Introduction to His Thought (Kyoto: Hongwanji International Center, 1989), 314. 24. Ibid., 150. 25. For discussion of Shinran’s teaching about “immediate attainment of birth” see ibid., 169ff. 26. PF, 18–19. 27. For the leap (ōchō) and the moment (ichinen) and comparison with Kierkegaard, see D. T. Suzuki, “Shinran and Søren Kierkegaard,” in Popular Buddhism in Japan: Shin Buddhist Religion and Culture, ed. Esben Andreasen (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), 63–64. For more on Shinran’s existential interpretation of birth (ōjō) in the Pure Land here and now, see Omine Akira, “Shinjin Is the Eternal Now,” in Living in Amida’s Universal Vow: Essays in Shin Buddhism, ed. Alfred Bloom (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2004). 28. Ueda and Hirota, Shinran: An Introduction to His Thought, 153. 29. Isaiah 64:6. 30. WL, 44–60. Like Christianity, there are also three degrees of love/compassion in Pure Land Buddhism. In addition to the boundless muen no jihi, small compassion (shujoen no hiji) and medium compassion (hoen no jihi) roughly parallel romantic eros and friendly philia respectively. For a detailed comparison of Kierkegaard on love and Pure Land compassion, see Hidetomo Yamashita, “Japanese Pure Land Buddhism and Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard and Japanese Thought, ed. James Giles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Commanded neighbor love is also treated in chapter 6 of the present work. 31. Hajime Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, trans. Yoshinori Takeuchi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), lx. 32. “What self-power cannot accomplish by itself is made possible when the Great Compassion manifests itself. . . . As Kierkegaard has made clear, repentance is the fundamental and defining quality of ethics for the human person who, as a finite creature, is incapable of breaking away from bondage to original sin and radical evil.” Ibid., 190. 33. This is noticed by Donald W. Mitchell, Spirituality and Emptiness: The Dynamics of Spiritual Life in Buddhism and Christianity (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991), 116. 34. Yoshinori Takeuchi, The Heart of Buddhism, trans. James W. Heisig (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1983), 50. 35. Ibid., 52. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 58. 38. CUP, 556.

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39. For alternative treatments of Kierkegaard and Shin Buddhism, see Joel R. Smith, “Human Insufficiency in Shinran and Kierkegaard,” Asian Philosophy 6, no. 2 (1996), and Domingos de Sousa, “Shinjin and Faith: A Comparison of Shinran and Kierkegaard,” The Eastern Buddhist 38, no. 1/2 (2007). I would argue that both of these treatments place too much weight on the purely metaphysical differences between Kierkegaard’s Christianity and Shinran’s Buddhism, but they are otherwise helpful treatments.

5 The Jewish Problem

T

he relationship of Christianity to Judaism is significantly unlike its relationship to other religions. In the case of Christianity’s relationship to a religion such as Pure Land Buddhism, for example, it is clear through and through that the language, customs, and history of the two traditions are radically different and that their central teachings are even formally opposed to one another on logical grounds. Judaism and Christianity, on the other hand, are intimately related. Historically, their relationship is not unlike the manner of parent to child. Christianity may perhaps be regarded as a rebellious child, but not so rebellious that Christians have in any straightforward way abandoned and rejected their Jewish heritage. Rather, the pages of the Hebrew Bible find a new home as the Old Testament, and along with them the concepts and categories of a monotheistic God, creation, law, sin and atonement, and messianic hope. Instead of contradicting the law and the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Christ fulfills the law and the New Testament completes Old. In keeping with this view of Christianity’s understanding of itself as the fulfillment and perfection of Judaism, Kierkegaard treats Judaism according to a supersessionistic model of divine unfolding. According to Kierkegaard’s theory of evolution, paganism, which represents both all pre-Judaic religion as well as various traditions of non-Western religion, is superseded by Judaism, which is “merely a point of transition”1 and thus in turn is superseded by Christianity, which “contains the most glorious life-view.”2 Kierkegaard does not make the case for placement of Christianity at the pinnacle on historical or metaphysical grounds. Rather, Christianity is viewed as more complete ethically and existentially, providing a possible mode of ex— 67 —

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istence unavailable to non-Christian faith. There is no claim that Christianity does a better job of describing ultimate reality, provides a better metaphysical system, has more historical support, and so on. “Christianity is not a doctrine, but . . . an existence-communication.”3 While Christianity is epistemically on par with all else at the level of the what, only Christianity conveys the how of true faith. It is seen as a better existence-communication in that its categories communicate a more “glorious life-view.” Kierkegaard’s judgment is subjective, of course. In that sense, it is impossible to argue. If a subjectivist such as Kierkegaard should be convinced that one’s own religion is the one true religion and that all else is but entry-level truth, then it would seem that not much is left to be said that could in any way be rationally persuasive. Accordingly, I sense the irony of my thesis, namely, that Kierkegaard has misunderstood Judaism and that it is thus not obviously less glorious than any other tradition, Christianity not excluded. However, recalling again that, for Kierkegaard, a life-view is to be appropriated not merely subjectively but also with an eye toward the truth that subjectivity is untruth,4 it would seem then that exclusive claims to the supreme gloriousness of one’s own appropriated life-view are just the sort of claims that may usefully be held in check by means of some method of myth-busting. In what respect then is Christianity the most glorious according to Kierkegaard? In what respect is the how of Judaism deficient? The charges made by Kierkegaard are several. First, it is claimed that the distinctively Christian conception of neighborly love (agape) has abolished and replaced the Jewish ethics based on the worldly principle, “like for like.”5 Second, Christianity is concerned with eternal blessings, and is thus “different from Judaism and paganism, which taught essentially that this life is a life of enjoyment”6 Next, Christianity preaches the possibility of salvation for all, while “particularism appeared in its strongest possible form in the Jews.”7 Finally, “Christianity means the unconditional separation of the individual; paganism and Judaism are, inversely, domination by the categories of race and generation.”8 Let us examine the accuracy of these claims. Myth 1. Jewish religiousness is restricted by a worldly ethics of reciprocal “like for like” in contrast to a Christian ethics of asymmetry. “Christianity,” says Kierkegaard, “has abolished the Jewish like for like,”9 according to which anyone who causes harm to another should suffer exactly the same injury in return: “eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”10 Where the Jewish ethics is based on external reciprocity, the Christian “like for like” that replaces it “turns our attention completely away from the external, turns it inward and makes every one of your relationships to other people into a God-



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relationship,”11 such that “what others do unto you . . . does not concern you . . . what you do unto people, you do unto God, and therefore what you do unto people, God does unto you.”12 There is no doubt that the Christian ethic presented here is a very rigorous ideality and that it has no truck with tit-for-tat ethics. The relevant question in the present context, however, is whether Jewish religiosity fails to make a break with reciprocity as Kierkegaard here implies. In other words, is Kierkegaard’s bifurcation between a Christian ethics of asymmetry, according to which unconditional love of neighbor is an essential part of the God-relationship, and Jewish ethics of “eye for eye” reciprocity a fair representation? I submit that it is not. Consider, first, that the commands upon which Kierkegaard, following Jesus, bases the distinctively Christian ethics are Jewish commandments, originally from the Torah. When Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is, he finds no need to say here, “You have heard it said . . . but now I say unto you.”13 Rather, he points to the Torah, which encourages us first and foremost to love God,14 and on this basis, to love our neighbors in spite of what they do to us.15 It is precisely this response upon which Kierkegaard bases his understanding of the so-called “Christian like for like” as opposed to the Jewish. But this is disingenuous given the Jewish source of the command.16 There is also another good reason not to pigeonhole the ethics of Jewish religion as a version of tit-for-tat ethics of reciprocity in contrast to an exclusively Christian ethics of grace and asymmetry, namely, that there have been practicing Jews who argue explicitly for the very kind of ethics of asymmetry that is supposedly unique to Christianity in Kierkegaard’s eyes. Consider, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, an Orthodox Jew for whom distinctively Jewish religiousness is practically synonymous with an ethics of asymmetry: “The just person’s suffering for the sake of a justice that fails to triumph is concretely lived out in the form of Judaism.”17 Thus, for Levinas, the essence of Judaism, far from being characterized by “eye for eye” retaliation, is most essentially characterized by an asymmetrical ethics of suffering and responsibility for the other. Finally, Kierkegaard’s claim that the “Christian like for like,” in contrast to the “Jewish like for like,” makes the ethical relation to the other into a Godrelationship also reveals a mischaracterization of Judaism. Again, consider Levinas. Summarizing the prophet Jeremiah, Levinas affirms, “No relation with God is direct or immediate. The Divine can be manifested only through my neighbour.”18 Ironically, in fact, Levinas criticizes Kierkegaard on the very same score that Kierkegaard here criticizes Judaism. He condemns Kierkegaardian subjectivity as “exhibitionistic,” “immodest,” a self-identical egoism obsessed by a perverse inwardness. It is an “existence tensed over

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itself;” “the anxiety of A for A” and “the Same in its care for the Same.”19 The Kierkegaardian self, claims Levinas, “consumes itself with desires,” and one in particular, the “thirst for salvation.” This self, whose longing for the eternal is little more than the desire to be saved from worldly torments, is hardly concerned for the neighbor, but desires to be alone, before God to be oneself. In the end, I am convinced that Levinas is just as unfair toward Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard is toward the Jewish religion,20 but the important point for our purposes is just that it is clear that distinctively Jewish categories are no less capable than Christian categories of expressing and evoking a deeply religious ethics beyond the bounds of mere reciprocity. Myth 2: Jewish religiousness is not properly religious; it lacks the eternal. One of the enduring themes in the previous chapters has been that the religious life is a life marked by suffering. “Christianity,” Kierkegaard reiterates in the Journals, “teaches that this life is a life of suffering,” and “eternity” comes only upon the heels of suffering. He immediately follows this statement by concluding that “Christianity is [therefore] different from Judaism and paganism, which taught essentially that this life is a life of enjoyment, but then also lacked eternity.”21 While “Christianity is renunciation,” says Kierkegaard, “Judaism is divinely sanctioned optimism, sheer promise for this life.”22 One might think that Kierkegaard aims to make the following point: Christians believe in everlasting life after death in Heaven and are thus willing to suffer in this life, while Jews have no such concept of an afterlife and therefore live only for enjoyment in this life. But there are two problems with this reading of Kierkegaard’s remarks. First, it hardly seems likely that Kierkegaard was so ignorant of the Jewish religion that he would have been unaware that, historically, many Jews have believed in everlasting life after death. The Pharisees, for example, who represented a majority opinion, are reported to have believed “that souls have an immortal vigor in them, and that under the earth there will be rewards or punishments, according as they have lived virtuously or viciously in this life; and the latter are to be detained in an everlasting prison, but that the former shall have power to revive and live again.”23 Second, in keeping with Kierkegaard’s view that faith is not a doctrine, Kierkegaard explicitly warns his readers against confusing eternal life with “life after death in the sense of a long life.”24 Thus, the eternity that Judaism is supposed to lack must be something different from everlasting life after death. What does Kierkegaard mean, then, when he suggests that the Jews “lacked eternity” and made “enjoyment” the goal of this life? He is not entirely per-



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spicuous, but part of Kierkegaard’s charge appears to be that Judaism lacks a robust concept of grace, and likewise, that it is too “optimistic”25 regarding the natural capacities of human beings. This would fit with Kierkegaard’s Lutheran theological training, according to which he no doubt learned that the Jewish religion places undue hope in the power of the Law to save, in contrast to the Christianity of the New Testament, which places hope for salvation in the Gospel of grace.26 Furthermore, not only does Judaism lack grace, and hence does not qualify as properly religious from the standpoint of religiousness B, Kierkegaard also calls it “enjoyment,” by which he means that it is not even properly moral. He appears to be following Kant, for whom “Judaism is really not a religion at all,” but a non-moral political arrangement.27 Kant argues this on the basis of three observations. First, Judaism is only concerned with external acts and outer observance to laws, i.e., just the sorts of things that a political body can enforce. This corresponds to Kierkegaard’s suggestion that Jews lack the eternal. Second, the Jews obey the commandments of God solely as means to this-worldly rewards and punishments, that is, the kind that a political body can dole out. This corresponds to Kierkegaard’s claim that the Jews taught a life of enjoyment. Finally, because the Jewish people view themselves as God’s chosen people, they thereby exhibit a particularism that lacks concern for the good of mankind as a whole. We will come back to the last of three charges below, but what of the first two? It is charged that Judaism is not genuinely religious because it lacks grace, and cannot even be said to be properly moral because it lacks the demand of inner obedience. Is it correct that Judaism is a religion of works and that it lacks a concept of grace? Emmanuel Levinas suggests that it is not: “There is not a single thing in a great spirituality that would be absent from another great spirituality. The idea of grace is not at all an idea rejected by Jewish spirituality.”28 First, we might note that, historically speaking, grace is a Jewish concept, originating in the scriptures of the Hebrews long before Christianity came on to the scene. Consider, for example, the story of Jonah: God calls upon Jonah to go to Nineveh and deliver a word of judgment, but Jonah refuses, choosing instead to flee by ship in the opposite direction. Jonah then gets caught in a storm, cast overboard by the ship’s crew, and swallowed by a large fish. After three days, Jonah repents of his refusal to do the will of the Lord, and God releases him from the belly of the fish. God tells Jonah again that he must go to the Ninevites and preach judgment. This time Jonah obeys, but only reluctantly. Jonah preaches; the Ninevites repent; and God spares them his wrath. But this displeases Jonah. We now learn why Jonah was so reluctant. Jonah knows that God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and

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abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”29 Jonah would rather see the Ninevites suffer justice than to receive divine pardon. What Jonah does not fully realize, however, is that he too is sustained by the grace of God. Jonah has not earned God’s favor. No one can perfectly fulfill the infinite responsibility taught in the Torah. Jonah thus has no right to be angry. For who is Jonah to begrudge the grace of God for all?30 Rather, Jonah should rejoice in the divine grace, emulate it, and long to see that grace showered even upon his enemies. Levinas reminds further that Judaism is a living tradition that has continued to develop well beyond the period of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Accordingly, he draws our attention to Maimonides as one who passionately affirms divine grace as the corollary of repentance. Levinas paraphrases, “once this first gesture is accomplished . . . [the divine grace] will come to your assistance and will give you more than the part equal to what you have done.”31 The Christian myth that Judaism is a religion of works rather than of grace is long-standing, but some New Testament scholarship shows that even Paul did not understand Judaism as a legalism. E. P. Sanders, for example, has argued convincingly that Paul would have understood Judaism to be a religion of covenant and grace, and that keeping the Mosaic Law was never regarded as a means to salvation in the Rabbinical tradition. Rather, obedience to the Law was always regarded as the response to a God-initiated covenant of grace.32 Grace, therefore, has always been at the very heart of Judaism; it is by no means “lacking.” What about the second charge, that Judaism lacks the properly ethical because it places sole emphasis on the worldly benefits of prudent action? In sharp contrast to this charge, Levinas has argued that Judaism is best defined in terms of ethics, and in turn, has defined ethics as interruption of enjoyment.33 In opposition to Kant and Kierkegaard, who suggest that Judaism is concerned solely with external obedience to the Law as a means of worldly benefits, Levinas suggests that Judaism, much like Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity, provides the basis for a noneudaimonistic ethics of “suffering for the suffering of the other.”34 For Levinas, there is no practical reason to be part of this Jewish lunacy that battles against the entire world in the name of truth and goodness other than the conviction that this is what God of Torah and Midrash demands of us. Given the harsh reality that evil often triumphs, there is no prudential reason to desire goodness and to fight for it. The effort does not award any prize; there is no practical hope that goodness will prevail. The battle for justice seems to lead to a dead end. Yet, “To be a Jew means . . . to be an everlasting swimmer against the turbulent, criminal human current.”35 Thus, far from



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obeying the commandment of God solely for the sake of earthly treasure (the motive that Kant attributes to Judaism), Judaism teaches that human beings are called to suffering for the other’s suffering precisely at the point where it makes no human sense to obey, even at “the moment God withdraws Himself from the world and veils His countenance.”36 Likewise, Kierkegaard’s suggestion that Judaism lacks the eternal because of an exclusive concern with a worldly life of enjoyment also turns out to be a myth. Myth 3: While Christianity preaches the possibility of salvation for all, Jewish religiosity is narrowly particularistic. Myth 4: In contrast to Christianity, which places an emphasis on becoming an individual before God, Judaism teaches salvation through race. These last two myths can be dealt with together. According to Kierkegaard, “particularism appeared in its strongest possible form in the Jews,”37 and in contrast to Christianity, which “means the unconditional separation of the individual; paganism and Judaism are, inversely, domination by the categories of race and generation.”38 Kierkegaard’s thinking here seems to be that while Christianity recognizes the need for becoming single individuals before God and being born again through encounter with transcendence, Judaism teaches that the primary means by which human beings enter into covenant with God is on the basis of their first birth, in particular, through birth into the Jewish race. Given this conception, suggests Kierkegaard, Jews thereby lack any sense of the need for the second birth of existential self-transformation. Recall the discussion of Nicodemus. Nicodemus saw no need for a second birth. He had been born as a Jew and a Pharisee. No greater heritage was imaginable for Nicodemus. He was a member of the people of God by virtue of his having been born a Jew. Yet Jesus told Nicodemus that “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”39 In the previous chapter, I suggested that Kierkegaard placed premium importance on this notion of being born again. I by no means wish to dispute this importance. However, Kierkegaard’s remarks in the journal entries quoted above suggest that he thinks that all religious Jews share the mind of Nicodemus. Kierkegaard suggests that all Jews stake their eternal well-being on the fact that they belong to a particular race and therefore see no need for a singular God-relationship. I do wish to dispute this charge. According to Levinas, the Jewish notion of being chosen “expresses less the pride of someone who has been called than the humility of someone who serves. . . . In Judaism, the certainty of the absolute’s hold over man—or religion—does not turn into an imperialist expansion that devours all those who

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deny it. It burns inwards, as an infinite demand made on oneself, an infinite responsibility.”40 Thus, it is wrong to regard Judaism as a base particularism, which, in the words of Kant, “on the ground that it was a special people chosen by God for Himself .  .  . showed enmity toward all other peoples.”41 Rather, Judaism is a “particularism that conditions universality”42 in that “the idea of being chosen .  .  . originally expresses the awareness of an indisputable assignation from which an ethics springs.”43 Being chosen has nothing to do with exclusive rights, and everything to do with an exceptional sense of duty toward the neighbor, whether Jew or non-Jew, rich or poor, beautiful or disfigured. Likewise, the notion of the election of Israel has nothing to do with national or racial categories. The election of Israel is “a moral category rather than a historical fact to do with Israel.”44 Judaism qua cultural-ethnic category is a fine and beautiful tradition, and may well be faithful to the concept of Israel. But one need not be a Jew to be Jewish; nor are all Jews Jewish. Rather, being Jewish is an existential category. A Jew in this sense is one who experiences himself or herself as a responsible member of humanity in which we are all chosen to be responsible for everyone else—even as I am one degree more responsible than all the others.45 While both the idea that Judaism professes a narrowly particularistic ethics and the idea that Judaism preaches salvation by means of belonging to a chosen race could no doubt be supported by reference to particular figures and movements within Judaism, it is blatantly false that all Jews and all selfunderstandings of Judaism are subject to such criticisms. The Root of Kierkegaard’s Exclusivism Having put to rest Kierkegaard’s dubious claims regarding the superiority of Christianity over Judaism, it is fruitful to consider wherein the source of Kierkegaard’s error lies. I would like to suggest that an important part of the answer to this question lies in Kierkegaard’s failure to extend the same sort of distinctions to non-Christian religions that he freely applies to Christianity. First, though Kierkegaard draws a sharp contrast between Christianity, which is what Climacus means to explicate by means of religiousness B, and Christendom, which is characterized by external conformity and doctrinal assent, he fails to apply a parallel distinction in the case of non-Christian religions. The same can be said regarding the related distinction between religiousness A, or immanent religion, and the religiousness of transcendence, religiousness B. Consider the four charges against Judaism discussed above. There is no question that all of these four criticisms are legitimate when ap-



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plied to some concrete manifestations of Judaism. But to suggest that Jewish religiosity in its most decisive expressions falls prey to these criticisms is disingenuous. Of course it is true that a great deal of “Judaism” is pharisaical, hypocritical, and religiously shallow. But, as Kierkegaard himself stresses over and over, this is no less true of Christianity, hence the need for the Christianity’s distinction from Christendom. As to why Kierkegaard fails to extend the same courtesy to Judaism that he does to Christianity in this regard, I think that we can only say that he was a man of his times, and perhaps for that, we might forgive him.46 But this is a courtesy that we arguably ought not to extend to Kierkegaard’s twenty-first-century counterparts. Notes  1. JP, 2:2208. Whether one should go so far as to regard Kierkegaard’s supersessionism and clear bias against the religion of Judaism as anti-Semitism is an open question. For a recent treatment of Kierkegaard’s supposed anti-Semitism, see Peter Tudvad, Stadier På Antisemitismens Vej: Søren Kierkegaard Og Jøderne (Stages on the Way of Anti-Semitism: Søren Kierkegaard and the Jews) (Rosinante, 2010).  2. JP, 5:5222. Note that Islam has no special place in this evolution, but is rather regarded as a poor imitation of Christianity: “It is therefore very interesting to see the Mohammedans in a curiously ironical manner bearing the coat of arms which so appropriately characterizes their relationship to Christianity—the moon, which borrows its light from the sun” (3:2736).  3. CUP, 379–80.   4. This is the conclusion of the argument of chapter 2 of the present work.  5. WL, 366–67, 384.  6. JP, 4:4803.   7. Ibid., 1:410.   8. Ibid., 2:2068, 2045. In addition to my comments in the next section, see also Jennifer Goolsby Pouya, “Kierkegaard and the Jewish Shadow,” in Kierkegaard and Religious Pluralism, ed. Andrew J. Burgess (San Diego: Wipf and Stock, 2007).  9. WL, 376. 10. Leviticus 24:19–20. 11. WL, 376. 12. Ibid., 383–84. 13. See Matthew 5:17–48 where Jesus attacks the moral vision of the established Judaism of his day. Jesus is not arguing against Jewish religiosity as such here, but, as he puts the matter elsewhere, against misappropriation of certain aspects of the Jewish law to the detriment of the “weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23). 14. Deuteronomy 6:5. 15. Leviticus 19:17–18.

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16. We might develop this direction further still by examining the context in which the “eye for an eye” law is given. While it is true that this law has sometimes been understood to recommend a general ethic of reciprocity, this is far from clear. For discussion, see Eugene B. Borowitz, Liberal Judaism (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1984), 384ff. 17. Emmanuel Levinas, “To Love the Torah More Than God,” in Yossel Rakover Speaks to God: Holocaust Challenges to Religious Faith, ed. Zvi Kolitz (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1995), 30. 18. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 159. See also Jeremiah 22:16. 19. Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 67–68. 20. For a discussion of Levinas as a poor reader of Kierkegaard, see Merold Westphal, “The Many Faces of Levinas as a Reader of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Poltics, and Religion, ed. J. Aaron Simmons and David Wood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). For a collection of essays on the many points of contact between Kierkegaard and Levinas, see Westphal’s Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 21. JP, 4:48403. 22. Ibid., 2:2224. 23. Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews. Josephus: The Complete Works, trans. William Whiston (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998), 18.1.3. 24. CD, 208. For discussion of Kierkegaard’s view of eternal life with respect to this particular passage, see John H. Whittaker, “Kant and Kierkegaard on Eternal Life,” in Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion, ed. D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Kierkegaard also discusses his views on eternal life in “The Expectancy of an Eternal Salvation” (EUD, 253–73), where he distinguishes “the expectancy of the eternal” from “a superstitious belief in the future” (EUD, 259). 25. JP, 2:2224. 26. Accordingly, Luther’s law-gospel distinction has been regarded by some as the sharpest tool in Christian theology’s anti-Semitic toolbox. See, for example, John T. Pawlikowski, “Martin Luther and Judaism: Paths Towards Theological Reconciliation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43, no. 4 (1975). 27. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 116–17. 28. This remark, which Levinas makes in an interview, is prompted by Levinas’s interlocutor’s assumption that Levinas “reject[s] the idea of a pardon accorded by God” and that he “consider[s] this an important difference between [his] Jewish conception and the Christian conception.” Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 93. It might also be added here that of course Levinas rejects “cheap grace,” which Bonhoffer defines as “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance.” Dietrich Bonhoffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller and Irmgard Booth (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 36. Much of Levinas’s writing deals a blow to such grace. But then the same could be said of Kierkegaard’s authorship.



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29. Jonah 4:2. 30. Jonah 4:4. 31. Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 94. 32. Sanders refers to this view as “covenantal nomism.” See E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). 33. For a statement of Levinas’s account of enjoyment and of ethics as the interruption of enjoyment, see Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 72–74. 34. “No Identity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 146. Elsewhere Levinas refers to this non-eudaimonistic ethic as “non-useless suffering (or love).” “Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-theOther (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 100. 35. Yossel Rakover, quoted in “To Love the Torah More Than God,” 29. 36. Ibid. 37. JP, 1:410. 38. Ibid., 2:2068. 39. John 3:3. 40. Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 174. 41. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 117. 42. Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 22. 43. Ibid., 26. 44. Ibid., 22. 45. Levinas is fond of quoting Dostoevsky’s Alyosha Karamazov of The Brothers Karamazov: “We are all responsible for everyone else—but I am more responsible than all the others.” 46. Yet one should not forget Kierkegaard’s own injunction to become a single individual and his insistence that the “crowd is untruth” (JP, 3:2932). From this angle, it is arguable that Kierkegaard did not live up to his own standard. But then again, neither do I. So it is better not to judge.

6 The Problem of Pantheism

T

here are different types of transcendence. To transcend in its most basic sense, after all, just means to “pass beyond,” “rise above,” “go across,” or to adhere even more literally to the Latin transcendere from which it derives, “climb over.”1 The word in English almost always refers to some figurative form of climbing over, such as rising above some predicament. In a philosophical and religious context, transcendence usually refers to the ontological independence of God in relation to the material universe, which, at least in the history of Christianity, has most often been considered a distinct and separate created entity. But this is not the only meaning of transcendence within a philosophical and religious context, and arguably not the most important sense either. Following the work of Merold Westphal regarding the concept of transcendence, we can also distinguish and define religiously significant senses of epistemic transcendence and ethical transcendence in addition to and independently of the common notion of ontological or cosmological transcendence.2 In fact, the latter sense, while perhaps most interesting from the vantage point of the purely philosophical standpoint of Western metaphysics, is probably the least important from a religious and spiritual vantage point. If a strict ontological distinction between Creator and creature has any religiously significant meaning at all with respect to religious practice, it seems that its primary value lies precisely in its ability to generate the other two types of transcendence: God is the all-knowing Creator while simple creatures know only in part; God alone as the holy architect of the world is the morally perfect Lawgiver and Judge while we mere humans are the judged. — 79 —

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The most essential point of divine transcendence seems to have very little if anything to do with abstract debates between pantheism versus theism, monism versus dualism, materialism versus idealism, or even naturalism versus supernaturalism. Accordingly, I see no obvious reason that those who practice a religion in which the divine absolute is in some sense primarily or wholly immanent within in the universe, rather than being conceived and described as a separate and ontologically distinct creator, could not also be recognized as maintaining a robust sense of the more religiously essential doctrines of epistemic and ethical transcendence. As will become clear throughout the course of this chapter, Taoism provides an example of such religion. It is for this reason, I believe, that a deep and fruitful comparison can be made between the philosophy of Kierkegaard, for whom God is most very clearly something “absolutely different,” and who even explicitly mocks and disdains “pantheistic” religion,3 and Taoism, which is arguably not even broadly theistic, and for which the Tao is most essentially bound up in the ordinary world and the ebb and flow of the natural order. The Retreat from Sociality While the intertwined history and complex relationship between the ancient traditions of Taoism and Confucianism complicate generalization, it is safe to say that the principles and values emphasized in the main texts of philosophical Taoism, the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu, are in clear and sharp tension with Confucian norms and values as found in the Analects and, especially, the Hsiao Ching. The teachings of Confucianism were first explicated by Confucius in the sixth century BCE and then developed by various scholars throughout the Warring States Period (475–221 BCE). Confucius was a conservative, seeing himself not as an originator, but a “transmitter” of a set of values detectable in ancient Chinese religion and culture well before his own lifetime.4 These values are primarily social in nature: humanity (jen), propriety (li), righteousness (yi), filial piety (hsiao), and moral wisdom (chih). Propelled by Confucianism’s status as the state orthodoxy from Emperor Wu (141–87 BCE) to the modern era, they have thoroughly permeated Chinese cultural life for centuries. The place of Taoism in Chinese history is less tidy and fraught with ambiguities. On the one hand, what would eventually come to be called philosophical Taoism (Tao-chia) developed side-by-side and in opposition to the Confucianian tradition, with the texts of the Tao Te Ching and then the Chuang Tzu taking shape in reaction to the rise of Confucianism between



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the fourth and second centuries BCE. On the other hand, Taoist religion (Tao-chiao) has roots stretching back as far as the Shang dynasty (1766–1123 BCE).5 These two streams of Taoism have been historically intertwined since the early part of the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE), at which time it was practiced popularly in parts of China as Huang-Lao, the cult of the Yellow Emperor and Lao Tzu, and was favored above Confucianism by several early Han emperors.6 In contrast to the rigid sociality of Confucianism, Taoism is naturally heterodox, and its values are more inwardly focused, placing emphasis upon non-attachment (wu-wei), individual potential (te), spontaneity (tzu-jan), and free and easy wandering (hsiao yao yu). To be sure, the differences between the two traditions should not be overplayed. First, although only one bears the name, Taoism and Confucianism could each be called “taoistic” in the sense that the notion of the Tao plays a fundamental and similar role as a “way” that is at once descriptive of “the sum total of truths about the universe”7 and prescriptive for human beings to follow. As such, the individual is called to participate in the Tao through shaping every facet of oneself to be in compliance and subordination to something greater than oneself and of seemingly cosmic importance. Even for Confucianism, which is the less explicitly “religious” of the two traditions, the Tao is in some broad sense divine. Confucius calls it the way of Heaven (T’ien-tao)8 and regards knowledge of the Tao as a matter of ultimate concern: “He has not lived in vain who dies the day he is told about the Way.”9 The soteriological overtones of this passage are also complemented by a sense of fallenness. Individuals as well as society as a whole have lost their way and must return to the way of Heaven so that universal harmony may be restored.10 Yet for neither tradition is the Tao an anthropomorphic, personal deity or creator God. It is, rather, an immanent and all-pervading force woven into the fabric of the universe and inseparable from the natural order. With respect to the nature of human beings and social-political concerns, Confucian and Taoist scholars can be grouped together against the philosophy of Legalism. Taking its initial shape as a realistic and pragmatic school during the later Chou’s trend toward political corruption and making its indelible mark upon Chinese history in the “burning of books and burial of scholars” under the dynasty of the Ch’in (221–207 BCE), Legalism advocated a system of rewards and Draconian punishments as the key to social harmony and favored a Machiavellian “by any means necessary” approach to governing. In opposition, Confucians and Taoists insisted that true goodness must arise from internal commitment to the Tao rather than conformity to the law for the sake of external benefits. Kierkegaard placed emphasis upon inwardness and subjective authenticity as well, of course. But where the similarity with between Taoism and

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Kierkegaard becomes even more apparent is where the similarity of Taoism with Confucianism ends. While the emphases upon conscience of the heart (liang-hsin) and sincerity (ch’eng) are by no means peripheral to Confucian ethics, subjective values are nonetheless essentially related to the intersubjective project of humanity (jen). Listening to one’s conscience, even if sincere, does not replace or subvert conformity to the morality of sociality. The accent in Confucianism remains on appropriate action and communal conformity, especially propriety with respect to the ritual customs of one’s society (li) and obedience toward parents (hsiao). Moreover, while Confucianism rejects the kind of ruthless governmental coercion that was advocated by the Legalists, it is nonetheless characterized by the “soft” tyrannies of behavioral uniformity and a morality of shame: “Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rights, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”11 Thus even while the method is perhaps not as blunt for Confucianism as it is for Legalism, there remains the assumption that the hallmark of a harmonious society is achieved by force of uniformity. And while the internal sense of shame serves as motivation toward uniformity rather than the blunt force of legal punishment, the sense of shame itself is something heteronymously imposed by the moral judgments of the community. From Taoism, by contrast, the emphasis is firmly planted on the project of ethical self-cultivation of one’s virtue (te). Conformity to conventional virtue and the achievement of social harmony through propriety is not only absent from this program, but an obstacle. Insofar as the Confucian morality of uniformity impedes the spontaneity (tzu-jan) and free and easy wandering (hsiao yao yu) of spiritual seekers, it stands in the way of the self-transformation of the Tao. Accordingly, the early Taoists sages, including Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu themselves, retreated from society in order to find themselves in Nature, and later religious Taoists would often do the same in search of the elixir of immortality. In this respect, Taoism stands with Kierkegaard in that the “the single individual is higher than the universal”12 and “in an absolute relation to the absolute.”13 For Taoism, as for Kierkegaard, the individual conscience takes precedence over socially constructed morality and culture. In contrast to Confucius, who “travel[s] within,” the Taoist sage “go[es] beyond the human” and in absolute union with the great Tao, the human categories and distinctions between improper versus proper and good versus evil fall away. Accordingly, the rules and rituals of sociality do not constrain the external behavior of those who have been transformed by the Tao. Being led by the sense of belonging to a plane of existence “beyond the mundane” and answering only to the voice and power (te) of the Tao within, the moral judgments of “ordinary people” do not “worry” them.14 Absolute concern for



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the values of sociality, on the other hand, is a confusion of the absolute and the relative and indicates abandonment of the Tao: When the Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness is lost, there is morality. When morality is lost, there is ritual. Ritual is the husk of true faith, the beginning of Chaos.15

It is here that we encounter the sense of transcendence in Taoism, not an ontological or strictly metaphysical transcendence in the sense of a divine entity independent of the natural world, but an even deeper transcendence that manifests itself ethically, epistemically, and spiritually. Confucianism’s near identification of the way of Heaven (t’ien-tao) with the way of humanity (jen-tao) too narrowly limits Tao. It is actually a forgetfulness of the Tao rather than a responsibility to its spontaneous meanderings, thus tending toward conformism, ritualism, and stagnation. By conceiving of the Tao as ethically transcendent, Taoism consciously and emphatically avoids these pitfalls. Because the Tao is outside and above the way of humanity, it is also beyond ethics. Accordingly, the crowd is not the highest court of the appeal. The Taoist regards the rules and expectations of society with suspicion, even and especially when they are enforced by statutes and punishments in the name of law and order or by shame in the name of uniformity for the sake of social harmony. The Taoist conception of the Tao is bigger and wilder than the narrow Confucian interpretation. In contrast to the tamed, sociological conception of Confucianism, the great Tao is unreasonable, spontaneous, and uncultivated (p’u), putting it thoroughly outside of the control of the human doings. It is the foundation and origin of humanity rather than a product of sociality. With regard to epistemology, and further related to its ethical transcendence, the Tao eludes definition. As the Tao cannot be named and identified with just one of its manifestations, the Tao is ultimately mysterious and outside of the possibility of all human thinking.16 It cannot be grasped and mastered by intellectual reason. Accordingly, we cannot force ourselves into the Tao whether by behavioral conformity or by the power of intellect. It must be passively received through openness to its self-transformation in the form of effortless yielding (wu-wei). The Problem of Pantheism Given Taoist emphases upon harmony with nature, unity with the Tao, and the immanence of the Tao within the natural order, it is reasonable to classify

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Taoism as a type of pantheism. It is a little ironic, then, that one of the central points of similarity between Taoism and Kierkegaard can be found precisely within the latter’s critique of pantheism. There is no single sustained treatment of pantheism by Kierkegaard, but critical comments peppered throughout his writings clearly demonstrate a low view of it. As for many Christian theologians and philosophers both before and after him, pantheism serves as what Tillich has called “a ‘heresy label’ of the worst kind.” Accordingly, we would do well to follow the advice of Tillich and define it “before it is applied aggressively,”17 which is clearly the way Kierkegaard makes use of the term. The standard dictionary definition of pantheism, as implied by its etymology, is “that God and the universe are identical (implying a denial of the personality and transcendence of God); the doctrine that God is everything and everything is God.”18 Tillich, for his part, quibbles that “Pantheism is the doctrine that God is the substance or essence of all things, not the meaningless assertion that God is the totality of things.”19 But in any case, the main thrust of the doctrine entails that at some fundamental level and in some manner there is a basic identity between God and world, the spiritual and the natural, and what is most potentially problematic from Kierkegaard’s perspective, divinity and humanity. The notion that God is ultimately somehow identical with, immanent within, or dependent upon us, or conversely stated, that in our most fundamental essence we are ourselves divine, is deeply troubling to Kierkegaardian ears and, from the perspective of Christian theism, smacks of self-flattery. It is this basic ontological identity of the divine and the human that sets the stage for Kierkegaard’s less than neutral description of pantheism as “an acoustical illusion that confuses vox populi [voice of the people] and vox dei [voice of God]” and “a vaporous image formed out of the fog of temporality . . . which claims to be the eternal.”20 Yet, it is not the mere ontology that troubles him. The problem of pantheism does not lie in its metaphysics, but in what Kierkegaard sees as the epistemological and ethical implications of pantheism. In other words, it is not the bare fact that there might be some abstract and hidden identity between the essence of God and the essence of humanity that causes Kierkegaard to repeatedly use the label “pantheist” as if it were a slur and insult. The real problem lies in the denial of epistemic and ethical transcendence. And neither, it should be added, are Kierkegaard’s remarks on pantheism directed primarily at Eastern religions, or for that matter, Western Spinozism. No, as Westphal rightly indicates, “What is at issue is not whether a philosophy agrees with, say, Spinoza, on this or that theorem, but whether by virtue of its claim to



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finality a philosophical system denies or distracts attention from the temporal conditions of moral life.”21 Pantheism, accordingly, is Kierkegaard’s name for what happens when a particular historical system fantastically forgets its own particularity and historical contingency. In this sense, “every system must be pantheistic simply because of the conclusiveness.”22 Thus, the pantheistic tendency can manifest itself not only epistemically in the “highbrow way” of an all-encompassing theoretical system, such as Hegelianism, but also ethically in the “lowbrow way”23 of an established and totalizing pop-cultural system, such as Christendom. Accordingly, since the real issue is the problem of alltoo-human presumption sanctioning itself as divinely authoritative wisdom, the problem of pantheism is just as capable of infecting Danish Lutheran theists or twenty-first-century American evangelicals as it is for those who would actually wear the label and maintain it as theological doctrine. Just as the kind of Christianity to which Kierkegaard hopes to see his readers converted is an “existence-communication” rather than a doctrine,24 the same can be said of the “pantheism” which Kierkegaard regards as Christianity’s cancerous opposite.25 As the imagery of an acoustical illusion implies, the problem of pantheism arises at the point at which the divine is reduced to nothing more than echo of our own very human voices, telling us all and only what we want to hear and confirming the established order.26 Whether vox populi, vox dei is a problematic metaphysical issue is a moot point. It is, however, a tried and true political slogan, the effectiveness of which highlights another troubling aspect of such thinking, namely, the “pantheistic, debauched contempt for individual human beings”27 or what Kierkegaard elsewhere refers to as “the leveling process.”28 The “pantheistic fading away”29 of the individual is the natural corollary of an absolutized established order. Whether it is our churches, schools, and science labs playing God in the educational arena, monolithic corporate organizations letting nothing stand in the way of serving Mammon, or the Napoleonic state marching through history as if it were the “divine Idea as it exists on earth,” it is the individual who “pays the penalty and suffers the loss.”30 If the universal is the absolute, the particular is nothing and standing out as an individual, especially as one who would challenge and disrupt the established order on the basis of allegiance to something beyond and outside the established order, is treacherous blasphemy.31 But if the absolute is above the universal, then the individual is above the universal in relation to the absolute,32 and “the single individual,” accordingly, “is and remains the fixed point that can hold against pantheistic confusion.”33

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The Sociality of Inwardness Whatever can be said about whether Taoism fits neatly within the categories of monist metaphysics and ontological pantheism, it is clear that Taoism does not amount to a “pantheistic” denial of ethical and epistemic transcendence. It is here in the affirmation of such transcendence that Taoism and Kierkegaard stand united. But is the rejection of morality and sociality in the name of individual religious conscience a good thing? What, if anything of any value at all, are we left with once we travel beyond the sociality of morality? The catchphrase of 1960s counter-culture, crafted and popularized by American psychologist and psychonaut Timothy Leary, was “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Unfortunately, the phrase was often misunderstood by critics, not to mention practically misappropriated by large swaths of “angelheaded hipsters,”34 to mean “Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.”35 Accordingly, the slogan was reordered and rephrased in a late interview with Leary as “drop out, turn on, drop in,”36 emphasizing that dropping out did not mean permanent external withdrawal or irresponsible rebellion, and that, ultimately, the whole point of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, was ultimately to achieve some important form of self-cultivation and spiritual enlightenment and then drop back in and do something socially important with one’s life. This final movement of “dropping in,” which must be preceded by “dropping out” of the sociality of the crowd and “tuning in” and “turning on” to oneself in inwardness, is paralleled in what I here call the “sociality of inwardness,” which finds exemplification in Kierkegaard’s so-called “second ethics,”37 as well as in the paradoxical Taoist notion of wei wu-wei, to act without acting. That Kierkegaard is an individualist can hardly be denied. This is clear from what has been argued above. Just in case there should be any doubt, Kierkegaard assures us that the category of “that single individual” was so important to him that these words should be engraved on his tombstone.38 Yet, pointing the attention of his readers to what would become Works of Love, he also chides those who would assume that his careful attention to individualism implies a lack of concern for community with others: “they will probably bawl out that I do not know what comes next, that I know nothing about sociality. The fools!”39 Despite the dogged emphases upon inwardness, individuality, and subjectivity, and notwithstanding his unyielding conviction that ethical and moral norms must always be open to teleological suspension in the name of the individual’s absolute commitment to religious duty, Kierkegaard was by no means antithetical to the idea of community as such. Rather, he argues that



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what he critiques under the names of “the public” or “the crowd” is really no community at all, but an empty set of numerical zeroes, each too weak and afraid to stand apart as a genuine single individual lest they miss the chance to be somebody respectable. A real community, by contrast, is one that, while being more than a mere happenstance conglomeration of individuals and thus “no doubt more than a sum,” is “still a sum of units” nonetheless.40 Community is possible when and only when a group of authentic “individuals (each one individually) are essentially and passionately related to an idea and together related to the same idea.”41 The “harmony of the spheres,” by analogy, is made possible by each planet relating not just to the other planets, but in each individually relating itself to the Sun. If either relation is removed, there would be only chaos. The same, Kierkegaard suggests, is true for a string quartet. Unless each instrument is in tune not only with the others, but also with itself, there can be no music, only clamor. Individuality and sociality are not opposed, but work together in dialectical harmony. The fact that Kierkegaard would regard individuality as important to community is unsurprising. But Kierkegaard’s admission that community is more than a sum of individuals is noteworthy. This “more” consists in the relation each individual has with respect to the other, a relation that has already been hinted at above, namely, love. The word “love” is at once so overused and generic as to be almost without meaning and, on the other hand, so laden with warm and gushy overtones that whatever meaning it does carry makes its use in this context just as likely to confuse as clarify. But irrespective of the muddle of thoughts, images, and emotions that flood over one’s mind when the word is uttered, and in spite of all the difficulties of utilizing the category of love as a rigorously defined concept, probably even because of these things, it is a central category for Kierkegaard. The central theme and inspiration of countless poems and various compositions from Plato’s Symposium to the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love,” it is also, of course, a well-established theme in the New Testament, which is from where Kierkegaard takes his point of departure. In particular, Works of Love is an extended meditation on the commandment of Jesus: “You shall love the neighbor.”42 That love is commanded is of fundamental importance to Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christian love. Without disparaging the kind of love that is so often sung about by poets, Kierkegaard maintains that what distinguishes Christian love and sets it above romantic love and friendship is that it is most essentially a response to divine authority rather than a preference.43 It is no great feat, after all, for even the most godless and corrupt of thieves and murderers to find themselves with feelings of love for their own partners and families. The highest love, on the other hand, is non-preferential, which is

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not just an abstract love of humanity, but concrete and particular love of “the neighbor,” where the neighbor is not only the friendly man living around the corner, but every and any boor with whom one finds oneself standing nigh in proximity. “If there are only two people, the other person is the neighbor; if there are millions, everyone of these is the neighbor.”44 Love is not primarily a matter of inward feelings or emotions. If that were the case, a commandment to love and duty to love would be a “contradiction”45 and “the most preposterous talk.”46 Love is, nonetheless, most essentially an inward enterprise. It is a “matter of conscience,”47 which requires utmost “passion”48 and proceeds from “a place in the person’s innermost being.”49 The outward works of love, externally engaging in this or that type of objective activity, are the natural fruit of inwardness, but the root of love is the God-relationship. It is only when one abides in the spring of love through the cultivation of oneself as an individual before God in inwardness that the fruits of love become recognizable.50 Kierkegaard’s emphasis on individuality does not exclude sociality. The critique of the crowd and the related teleological suspension of the ethical are not because Kierkegaard is anti-community or because sociality of morality makes life for individuals too ethically difficult. The problem is clearly the opposite. The sociality of inwardness is infinitely higher and more rigorous. Kierkegaard’s understanding of love finds a parallel in the conception of tz’u, one of the so-called Three Treasures of Taoist ethics: But I have three precious things which I prize and hold fast. The first is gentleness; the second is economy; and the third is shrinking from taking precedence of others. With that gentleness I can be bold; with that economy I can be liberal; shrinking from taking precedence of others, I can become a vessel of the highest honour. Now-a-days they give up gentleness and are all for being bold; economy, and are all for being liberal; the hindmost place, and seek only to be foremost;—(of all which the end is) death.51

The word tz’u, here translated as “gentleness” to contrast with boldness, but more usually translated as “love,” “compassion,” “beneficence,” and so on, is most specifically “motherly love.”52 This is not, however, to be taken in the sense of exclusivity. The Taoist conception of tz’u is like the affection a mother has for her child in that it is gentle, nurturing, and does not force itself in a heavy-handed way, but unlike preferential affection is extended outward to all equally. “In Taoism, love means Mother Nature as the Earth bearing



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forth all creatures. . . . Love means the acceptance of all as part of the self; it is to imitate the unmotivated and undifferentiated love of Mother Nature.”53 Chuang Tzu, accordingly, argues that perfect benevolence (tz’u) is bigger than filial piety and deeper than Confucian jen, which is based on preferential affection for one’s own family and graded as it extends outward. The Chuang Tzu relays the story of a provincial minister coming to the master to learn of the nature of love. In response, Chuang Tzu at first points to tigers and wolves, but the student is understandably perplexed as to how the master could point to such vicious and carnivorous beasts as the exemplars of benevolence, and he begs for clarification. Chuang Tzu clarifies that sires and cubs show warm affection to one another, but the student is not satisfied, realizing that such affection cannot possibly define benevolence in its most complete sense. To this Chuang Tzu agrees, and responds in a way that must have been altogether shocking to the Confucian ears of his student. “Perfect benevolence knows no affection,” and by extension, since filial piety rests upon affection, “Perfect benevolence is a lofty thing—words like filial piety would never do to describe it.”54 Tz’u makes no distinction and is directed equally to those with whom one has a familial relation and those to whom one does not, to “people who are good” and “people who are trustworthy” and “people who are not good” and “people who are not trustworthy.”55 It is in this sense that the Taoist sage “keeps his mind in a state of indifference to all.” The sage is beyond the sphere of ordinary social relations, beyond all distinction between good and evil most primarily in his imitation of the Tao itself. He loves all people indiscriminately and “he deals with them all as his children.”56 Kierkegaard’s conception of Christian love and the Taoist conception of love obviously rest on different metaphysical stories and utilize different terminologies, but in addition to the similarity in the universal scope of equal love toward all, both Kierkegaard and Taoists find the source of “love’s hidden life”57 in the individual’s relationship to Love itself. It is only when the individual cultivates inwardness, stands in absolute relation to the absolute, and thus abides in divine spring of love, that genuine, non-preferential love for all becomes possible. When the individual is severed from the source of love, on the other hand, and maintains relationships with other human beings on some basis of preferential affection rather than through being grounded in the love of God, then not only is the scope of love limited, but the quality of love is diminished as well. For Kierkegaard, there is “friction that occurs when the separateness of the individual inwardness in the religious life is omitted”58 and we end up with a “crowd” rather than a community. For Chuang Tzu, sociality without each individual being grounded in the inner relationship toward the Tao is

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like a school of fish finding themselves on dry land and pathetically trying to keep each other hydrated by spitting water at one another.59 The only possibility of real harmony is abiding in the ocean of love itself. When each individual abides in divine love, love is given to all and received by all and the human community is in perfect harmony. This is not the world as we currently know it, of course. Rather, “the world has lost the Way, and the Way has lost the world.”60 “The whole thing is a lie and sin and a vale of tears.”61 How, then, can authentic human community be fostered and sociality of inwardness possibly be achieved in actuality? Since a true community of authentic individuals cannot be engineered artificially, but flourishes spontaneously, as a result of each individual, as an individual, abiding in love, there can be no shortcuts. The first and most obvious answer, accordingly, is that each of us, individually and before God, must become a single individual and resolve to take up the responsibility of fulfilling the commandment “You shall love” with all the passion of infinity. “Shut your door and pray to God . . . when you open the door that you shut in order to pray to God and go the very first person you meet is the neighbor, whom you shall love.”62 But is not this entire vision of sociality a bit naïve? To foster community by means of neighborly love is surely a very nice thought, but loving is a complicated matter, especially if we are supposed to love everyone, and not only that, but in equal measure. Is this really practical? In addition, what Professor P thinks to be the most loving course of action with regard to Subject S under Condition C is different from the course of action recommended by Professor Q. Perhaps, then, it would be better to proceed with caution and think through this matter a little more rigorously before jumping headlong into loving everybody. What if I love the wrong person in the wrong way or too little or, God forbid, more than I am strictly required? Somebody could get hurt. On the one hand, the above worries are legitimate—at least to an extent. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s own Works of Love is full of discourses devoted to rationally analyzing what love is and what love is not and how to love in the right way. So the notion that loving is a complex matter worthy of serious intellectual attention is surely correct and also recognized by Kierkegaard. On the other hand, loving is first and foremost a matter of inwardness, and some basic grasp of what it means to have an inwardly sincere disposition toward loving the neighbor is surely “not difficult to understand.”63 It is, of course, more difficult to understand exactly what ought to be done to fulfill the love commandment in any concrete situation, and we can and should continue to have conversations about such things in our ethics classes. But if we are tempted to allow “interpreting and interpreting and scholarly research and new scholarly research” to become an actual objection and obstacle to fulfill-



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ing the love commandment, then “look more closely and you will see that it is in order to defend oneself against God’s Word.”64 In this respect, the Tao Te Ching is no doubt correct: “If we could renounce our sageness and discard our wisdom, it would be better for the people a hundredfold.”65 Still, the attempt to foster a harmonious community by means of individual participation in neighborly love is wholly idealistic. It could only possibly work if every member of the human race were to relate simultaneously and individually to the divine ground of love and then also relate to one another in love. Or, at very least, it would seem to take a majority. By Kierkegaard’s own admission, however, “Genuinely spiritual persons are so rare that they can be handled appropriately as exceptions.”66 But that the ideal of a community formed and developed by the sociality of inwardness is distant and difficult is no objection to working toward its achievement. Moreover, even if it is true that the majority of human beings are spiritually inauthentic and the entire world cruel and unloving, as a single individual “you have nothing at all to do with what others do to you—it does not concern you. . . . You have only to do with what you do to others . . . [and] yourself before God.”67 That said, the ideal of community is not so distant that its achievement is without hope. If the obstacle to the sociality of inwardness is a deficit of love in the world, the appropriate response is not despair, but the multiplication of love. “What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job?”68 To abandon hope for others, even “the worst reprobate,”69 is to abandon love, the highest and greatest calling of which is “to help another person to love God,”70 which, in turn, facilitates community by helping the other love the neighbor.71 To consider another human being as “but a good man’s job” and “to help another person to love God” might seem to indicate paternalism, in which case the very problem of pantheistic leveling once again rears its head. The potential danger is not an illusion. Helping another human being is often born out of hidden agenda and, even worse, can easily slip into a desire to mold others into carbon copies of ourselves and “domineeringly .  .  . crush the other person’s distinctiveness.”72 It is for this reason, warns the Chuang Tzu, “When someone tries to correct others, his own Virtue is clouded over, and his Virtue will no longer reach all the others. Trying to do so will destroy everyone’s innate nature.”73Accordingly, the only legitimate means by which the bad can be transformed are means that act without force (wei wu-wei), and the only path through which the godless can be directed toward divine love is indirect, even doubly indirect. To help the other to love God cannot, then, mean that we ought to meddle in another’s God-relationship.74 What then does it mean to help the neighbor

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love God? We find a clue in Kierkegaard’s view of proper self-love and his emphasis on the importance of becoming a single individual. Just as true love of the neighbor is predicated upon the transcendent relation of love toward God, “To love God is to love oneself truly.”75 Accordingly, “The one who loves has understood that it truly is the greatest, the only beneficence one human being can do for another, to help him stand by himself, to become himself, to become his own master.”76 Even here, however, the help must be indirect. In Kierkegaard’s metaphor, the help must hide behind “the dash” of love. It would be nonsensical and undercut the very meaning of what it means to be a single individual if the individual was, plain and simple, made into an individual through my help. If that were the case, the beloved’s independence would still be dependence. But if the other is truly and actually “standing by himself—through my help” and with the help hiding itself behind this dash, then the other will actually have been helped in the right way. That is, it must take place in a way that presupposes the beloved’s mastery over himself, without the pretension of “small-mindedness” that would think that the other needs to be more like me. It must respect the other as an individual at the outset, and rather than “domineeringly” wanting to crush the difference of the other, the one who loves truly “loves every human being according to his distinctiveness.”77 To use Kant’s language, beneficence treats the other as autonomous individual and as end in himself rather than as a means. In other words, it is not the place of human beings to judge, and much less to manipulate or control, but to love. Loving in this way, treating the other as if he is already a responsible self, the individual is actually helped to become a responsible self. Here again, we encounter similar lines of thought in the Tao Te Ching: “By not dominating, the Master leads.”78 “Because he has given up helping, he is the people’s greatest help.”79 If love respects the neighbor according to the neighbor’s distinctiveness and without forcing its way, will not the bad just keep being bad and the godless remain godless? “Yes, it certainly is possible, but then the opposite is also possible.”80 Love again clings to hope, which is the decision to “relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good”81 and to presuppose love in the ground of the other’s being.82 Hope is without guarantee, but is not without promise; and love is without force (wu-wei), but it is not without power (te). “The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid”83 and “love hides a multitude of sins.”84 That the weakness of love is in truth power (te) can be seen in the fruits of responsible non-action (wu-wei), such as in the case of the powers of persuasion and non-violence versus the poverty of retaliation, hiding the multitude of sins by keeping silent rather than spreading rumor, and letting go of offenses by forgiveness rather than holding onto grudges.85 Just as acting in vengeance when wronged, gossiping about the



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sins of your neighbor, and maintaining bitter grudges tend to do nothing but make matters worse, so also can the love of the neighbor, just by extending an olive branch of peace and the recognition of full human dignity, actually ameliorate the power of sin in the world. In this way “love prevents the sin from coming into existence, smothers it at birth”86 by taking away the occasion and freeing the other to love. Conclusion It was suggested at the outset of this chapter that the decisively religious sense of divine transcendence is not a doctrine of ontological transcendence, but rather consists in epistemic and ethical transcendence. Accordingly, in the case of this chapter’s dialogue with Taoism, the central points of comparison with Kierkegaard have not been narrowly metaphysical and philosophical, but practical and, in a purely negative sense, political. It has been shown that, despite great and deep differences regarding metaphysical assumptions, there are nonetheless deep and noteworthy parallels and points of complementarity between Kierkegaard and Taoism. This methodology and conclusion are in keeping with the broader emphasis in the present work on the how of faith rather than the what of doctrine. It is also fitting that our final chapter should have ended with a meditation on love, which is also a how rather than a what. The ethics of love is an ethics of the subjectivity rather than objectivity, which is to say, it follows no strict method, no single principle, or tradition, but in line with another theme in the work, its sole appeal is to the criterion of conscience. By the same token, the ethics of love is a category of both epistemic transcendence, in that love itself is incapable of being fully thematized and rationalized by the understanding, and ethical transcendence, in that it keeps the pantheistic totalizing of the morality of sociality in check. Finally, given the broader context of advancing interreligious dialogue and answering objections to the thesis of religious pluralism, it is noteworthy that love has shown itself in this way. Not only in the case of the dialogue with Taoism, but also in the instances of dialogue with Pure Land Buddhism (chapter 4) and Judaism (chapter 5), the how of love has in various ways shown through as bridge of agreement between Christianity and other religious traditions. This suggests a truth that has become all but commonplace in the present age, namely, that the true heart of religion is love. In some sense this is no doubt right. Kierkegaard himself acknowledges as much: “the only true object of a human being’s love is love, which is God, which therefore in a more profound sense is not any object, since he is Love itself.”87 Yet, there

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is a certain danger in turning love into religion, and even more, in reducing religion to love. One potential concern is that love is not the same important concept in all religions, and so some religions would be excluded by the criterion of love. But this is not my main worry. It was never my intention to claim that all religions are equally good, only that no one tradition should be regarded as singularly the best. Indeed, in this very chapter preference has been given to Taoism over Confucianism. My concern rather tends in the opposite direction. Kierkegaard expresses the worry as follows: Christianity is not infrequently presented in a certain sentimental, almost soft, form of love. It is all love and love; spare yourself and your flesh and your blood; have good days or happy days without self-concern, because God is Love and Love. . . . Understood in this way, however, God’s love easily becomes a fabulous and childish conception.88

But if love is understood in a more specifically Kierkegaardian way as obedience to conscience, suffering for others, self-denial, forgiveness of sin, and non-preferentiality toward all, then perhaps love is the heart of true religion. Notes  1. “Transcendence,” in Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Peter A. Angeles (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 296.  2. Merold Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 9–11.  3. For Kierkegaard’s conception of God as “absolutely different,” see PF, 44. Kierkegaard’s critique of pantheism is elaborated below in the second section.   4. “The Master said, ‘I transmit but do not innovate; I am truthful to what I say and devoted to antiquity,’” Confucius, The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1979), 7.1.   5. Julia Ching, Chinese Religions (New York: Orbis Books, 1993), 102; Isabelle Robinet, Taoism: Growth of a Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 37.  6. Ching, Chinese Religions, 103; Yen-zen Tsai, “Scripture and Authority: The Political Dimension of Han Wu-Ti’s Canonizaion of the Five Classics,” in Classics and Interpretations: The Hermeneutic Traditions in Chinese Culture, ed. Ching-i Tu (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000), 92.   7. D. C. Lau, “Introduction,” in The Analects (New York: Penguin, 1979), 11.  8. Confucius, The Analects, 5.13.   9. Ibid., 4.8. 10. Rodney Leon Taylor, The Religious Dimensions of Confucianism (New York: SUNY Press, 1990), 133; Edward G. Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-Wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 43.



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11. Confucius, The Analects, 2.3. 12. FT, 55. 13. Ibid., 113. 14. Chuang Tzu, The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. Martin Palmer (New York: Penguin, 2006), 55. 15. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), ch. 38. 16. Ibid., ch. 1. 17. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 1:233. 18. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “pantheism.” 19. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:233–34. 20. POV, 123. 21. Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette: Purdue University, 1996), 83. 22. CUP, 122. 23. SUD, 117. 24. CUP, 379–80. 25. JP, 4:3890. 26. PC, 88. 27. CUP, 355. 28. TA, 107. 29. JP, 4:3887. 30. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), 53, 44. 31. “But the established order will not put up with consisting of something as loose as a collection of millions of individuals, each of whom has his relationship with God. The established order wants to be a totality that recognizes nothing above itself but has every individual under it and judges every individual who subordinates himself to the established order. But that single individual who teaches the most humble and yet also the most human doctrine about what it means to be a human being, the established order will intimidate by charging him with being guilty of blasphemy” PC, 91. 32. FT, 55, 113. See also the discussion of the teleological suspension of the ethical in chapter 2 of the present work. 33. POV, 122, italics removed. 34. Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” in Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 1956), 1, line 3. 35. Timothy Leary, Flashbacks: An Autobiography (New York: J. P. Tarcher, 1983), 253. 36. Allen Ginsberg et al., “Changes,” in Notes from the New Underground, ed. Jesse Kornbluth (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 179. 37. CA, 20–21. 38. POV, 118. 39. JP, 5:5972.

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40. Ibid., 3:2952. 41. TA, 63. 42. Matthew 22:39. 43. On preferential versus non-preferential love, see especially WL, 52–60. 44. WL, 21. 45. Ibid., 24. 46. Ibid., 50. Kierkegaard is here in agreement with Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 161–62. 47. Ibid., 137. 48. Ibid., 50. 49. Ibid., 8. 50. Ibid., 14. 51. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. James Legge (New York: Dover, 1997), 67. 52. Ellen M. Chen, “Tao as the Great Mother and the Influence of Motherly Love in the Shaping of Chinese Philosophy,” History of Religions 14, no. 1 (1974): 53. 53. Ibid., 57. 54. Chuang Tzu, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 155. 55. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, ch. 49 (Mitchell). 56. Tao Te Ching, ch. 49 (Legge). 57. WL, 8, italics removed. 58. TA, 87. 59. Chuang Tzu, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, 80. 60. Ibid., 173. 61. JP, 2:1439. 62. WL, 51. 63. Ibid., 25. 64. FSE, 34. 65. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, ch. 19 (Legge). 66. JP, 3:3411. 67. WL, 383–84. 68. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, ch. 27 (Mitchell). 69. WL, 260. 70. Ibid., 107, italics removed. 71. M. Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 81. 72. WL, 271. 73. Chuang Tzu, The Book of Chuang Tzu, 133. 74. CUP, 77–78. 75. WL, 107, italics removed. Ferreira notes that this as a second “transitivity” of what it means to love God. See n. 71 above. 76. Ibid., 277–78. 77. Ibid., 274. 78. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, ch. 81 (Mitchell).



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79. Ibid., ch. 78 (Mitchell). 80. WL, 254. 81. Ibid., 249. 82. For Kierkegaard’s claim that “love is in the ground,” see WL, 220. This claim bears resemblance to the Taoist notion of the virtue (te) of the Tao as it manifests in each individual’s original nature. See n. 73 above. 83. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, ch. 78 (Mitchell). 84. WL, 282. 85. Ibid., 289–99. 86. Ibid., 297, italics removed. 87. Ibid., 264–65. 88. Ibid., 376.

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Index

Abraham, 2, 24n26, 39–40 the absolute, 2, 13, 32, 38–39, 57–58, 73, 80, 82–83, 85, 89 absolute fact, 25n44, 50–51, 54n33; vs. eternal fact, 47, 50 vs. simple historical fact, 8, 20, 25, 26n62, 49–50, 74 apologetics, 9–10, 25n46, 51 appropriation, 9–12, 34, 37, 40 approximation, 5, 8–9, 12, 33, 50 Barth, Karl, 60, 64n20 Buddha, Gautama, 15–17, 19, 22n1, 22n14, 26n62 Bultmann, Rudolf, 50–51, 53n21, 54n26, 25n44 Christ, x, 1, 2, 4–6, 9, 11, 20, 46–49, 51–52, 53n8, 53n11, 54n26, 59–60, 62, 64n20; See also God–man; incarnation; Jesus; paradox Christendom, xi, 13, 22n2, 37–38, 60, 74–75, 85–88; See also doctrine Chuang Tzu, 80, 82, 89, 91 common sense, 30–38, 41n5; and traditions, 34, 38, 40, 80, 83–84, 93 and wisdom, 5, 85, 91 community, 22n2, 37–38, 82–83, 86–91; vs. crowd, 11, 31–32, 38, 40, 41n9, 77n46, 83, 86–89 Confucianism, xiv, 80–83, 89, 94 conscience, 2, 35–41, 43n49, 82, 86, 88, 93–94 contemporaneity, 7–8, 50–52, 54n27, 54n33, 59–60; and personal relationship, 48, 60, 62 and truth, 12 — 105 —

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criterion, problem of the, xiii–xiv, 29–32, 36–41, 42n32, 43n51, 93; See also conscience doctrine, x–xiv, 2, 5–10, 12, 16–17, 19–21, 21n1, 22n2, 42n27, 45–49, 54n26, 54n33, 60–61, 68, 70, 74, 80, 84–85, 93, 95n31 doubt, ix, 8–9, 31, 33–34; See also skepticism, Socratic ignorance established order, 37–39, 53n7, 75n13, 85, 95 eternal happiness, xiv, 2, 8–9, 19, 22n14, 43n49, 58–59, 68, 70–73, 76n24 ethics: teleological suspension of, 34, 38–40, 57–58, 83, 86–88 ethics of conscience, 37–40, 65n32, 72, 74, 82 See also like for like Evans, C. Stephen, 47, 49 evidentialism, 9–10, 25n46, 34–37, 42n32, 51 exclusivism, xi–xiv, 1, 21n1, 27n75, 49, 57, 64n20, 67–68, 74–75 existence-communication, xii–xiii, 3–7, 19, 61, 68, 85 existence-contradiction, 6, 59; See also offense faith, x, 4–12, 19–20, 24n24, 24n44, 27n74, 32, 34, 37, 39–40, 42n27, 47, 49, 51–52, 54n33, 57, 62, 70, 75n13; and history, 3–6, 16, 48, 50–52, 54n27, 24n44 and shinjin, 60–62 See also doctrine; passion; subjectivity fanaticism, 8–10, 24n44, 26n60 fear and trembling, 38–40; See also doubt finitude, 3, 10 14, 18, 26n60, 48, 63, 65n32 forgiveness, 57, 60, 75, 75n28, 92, 94; See also grace God, nature of: absolutely different, 32, 80 how of love, 13, 87–89, 93–94 God-man, 47–48, 52, 53n11 God-relationship, xvn9, 11, 39, 48, 68–69, 73, 88–89, 91 Gospels, 3–7, 24n44 grace, 51–52, 54n26, 58–59, 61–63, 64n20, 69, 71–72, 76n28 great commandments, 69, 87, 90; See also love Hegel, G. F. W., 18, 32–33, 37–40, 47–48, 50, 52n4, 85 hermeneutics of suspicion, 35, 38, 40, 83; See also doubt; skepticism Hick, John, 2–3, 5, 14, 26n66, 46–50, 52, 53n8 incarnation, xii–xiv, 9, 46–52, 54n33 incognito, 17–18 indirect communication, 4, 17, 19, 22n1, 91



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individual: before God, 6, 36, 38–39, 43n49, 73, 88, 90–91 single individual, 34, 37–39, 42n26, 49, 77n46, 82, 85–87, 90–92, 95n31 infinite qualitative difference, 18 inwardness, xi–xii, 5–6, 24n42, 25n48, 34–35, 37–39, 50, 57–59, 68–69, 74, 81, 86, 88–91 See also subjectivity Jesus, historical, 3–4, 9–11, 20, 49; See also Christ Jonah, 71–72 Judaism, xiv, 67–75 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 18, 26n66, 31, 71–74, 92 Lao Tzu, 81–82 Law (Torah), 1–2, 67, 71 Levinas, Emmanuel, 69–73 like for like (redoubling, reduplication), 11, 60, 68–70, 72, 75n13, 75n16, 79; See also contemporaneity; forgiveness love: muen no jihi (compassion), 61–63, 65n30 preferential vs. commanded, 62, 87–89 of neighbor, 62, 68–70, 74, 87–88, 90, 92–93 self-love, 92 spring of, 88–89 tz’u (motherly love), 88–89 the moment, 51–52, 60, 62; See also incarnation; revelation Nicodemus, 73 paganism, xi, 12–14, 24n26, 67–68, 70, 73 pantheism, xiv, 32, 80, 83–86, 91, 93 the paradox, xii, 17, 27n75, 32, 47, 60, 86 passion, x, 5–6, 8, 10–13, 15, 19, 21, 24n44, 25, 34–35, 39, 52, 59, 72, 87, 88, 90 pluralism, ix, xi, xiii–xiv, 1–4, 20, 22n2, 45–46, 48–49, 93 Pontius Pilate, 10–11 prayer, x, 6, 12–13, 36, 90 Pure Land Buddhism, xiv, 57, 60–64, 67, 93 Real an sich, 2–3, 5, 18 reality: subjective, 17, 34, 50–52, 54n33, 62 realism vs. anti–realism, 1, 20, 22 system of, xii, 2, 6–7, 18, 33–34, 38, 41, 68, 85 ultimate, xii, 2, 4, 14, 16, 18, 20, 26n60, 33, 52, 68 rebirth, xii, 54n26, 59–63, 73 religiousness A, xii, 35, 57–59, 62–64, 64n3, 74; and self-power (jiriki), 61, 63, 65n32

108 Bibliography

See also subjectivity; Socratic recollection religiousness B, xii, xiv, 57–60, 62, 63, 64n3, 71, 74; and other–power (tariki) 61–63 See also exclusivism; grace; revelation; sin revelation, 4, 17–18, 49, 51–52 risk of faith, 6, 8, 9, 11, 25, 34, 37–40 salvation, ix, xiii, 17, 21, 21n1, 48, 52, 54n26, 61–62, 68, 70–74, 76n24, 81 self-deception, 36; See also sin sin, 90, 93; consciousness, xii, 35, 51–52, 54n33, 57, 59, 60 noetic effects, 14, 18, 48, 65n32 skepticism, 29–33; and Buddha, 22n14 vs. pluralism, 1, 22n2 Socratic ignorance, 11, 17, 32, 41n16; See also approximation, skepticism Socratic recollection, 48–49, 64n3 soteriological inclusivism, xiii, 1, 21n1 subjectivity, ix, xi, xii, xiii, 5–14, 17, 19, 20, 25n48, 34–38, 41, 42n27, 50, 58–59, 68–69, 81–82, 93; See also inwardness; passion subjectivism and relativism, xi, 19, 20–22, 34–36, 40 suffering, xii, 5–6, 10–11, 40, 43n49, 57–59, 63, 69–70, 72–73, 77n34, 94 supersessionism, xi, xiv, 67, 75n1, 76n26 Tao, 2, 7, 80–83, 89, 97n82 te (power), 81–82, 92, 97n82 Tillich, Paul, 84 transcendence, 2, 63, 73–74, 79–80, 83–84, 86, 93 truth: problem of conflicting truth-claims, xiii, 1–5, 20–21, 45, 48 See also the absolute; Christ, Pontius Pilate, reality; subjectivity upaya (skillful means), xiii, 14–17, 19–22, 61 Westphal, Merold, 12–14, 18, 59, 79, 84 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 25n44, 54n33 wu-wei (non–action), 81, 86, 91–92

About the Author

Aaron Fehir is associate professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religion at Saint Leo University. His research focuses on the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, existentialism, philosophy of religion, and East-West dialogue. He currently resides in Florida with his wife and two young children.

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